Keynote performance
Collaborators
Dr Alpha Abebe
Dr. Alpha Abebe is an Associate Professor with the Faculty of Humanities and Lead for African and Black Diaspora Studies (ABLD) at McMaster University. Her research interests include East African diasporas, transnational identities, and Black community engagement. She is an award-winning educator, teaching a range of interdisciplinary courses focused on equity and social justice, migration and diasporas, and critical inquiry and methods. Dr. Abebe is a Toronto-native and has over 20 years of experience as a community-based practitioner and researcher; this work has largely focused on engaging and championing youth from Black/African, immigrant, and low-income communities.
Isabella Akaliza
Isabella Akaliza is a PhD candidate in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies at York University. Her research engages Black feminist methodologies, centering relationality, embodiment, and the erotic as critical frameworks for knowledge production. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s theorization of the erotic as power, she examines how African sex workers articulate intimacy, labour, motherhood, and selfhood beyond dominant narratives of victimhood and hypersexualization. Through Black feminist theories of embodiment, she also explores alternative articulations of freedom that unsettle liberal frameworks of citizenship, foregrounding relationality and lived experience as sites of political belonging and possibility. She is also a research assistant to Dr. Naila Keleta-Mae on her research-creation project, Black And Free.
Paula Bornacelli
Paula Bornacelli (she/her) is a Kitchener based, Colombian-Canadian stage manager and graduate of the Theatre and Performance program at the University of Waterloo. Paula can’t wait to continue establishing her stage management career; recent credits include UNCIVILIZED (Theatre Passe Muraille), Mme Caeneus’s Canteen (ANIMA), The Nether (University of Waterloo) and Sometimes it Snows in April (Tottering Biped).
Coco Collective
Coco Collective is a Toronto-based, intergenerational arts ensemble dedicated to celebrating and advancing African-diasporic and Caribbean cultural expressions through dance, rhythms, storytelling, and community-engaged practice. Under the artistic direction of Collette "Coco" Murray, the Collective brings together multidisciplinary artists who honour ancestral knowledge while innovating contemporary performance rooted in cultural integrity. With a culturally relevant and responsive approach, Coco Collective company's work spans across non-proscenium spaces, stage, festival presentations, workshops, and research-creation projects that bridge artistic excellence with social impact. Performances have been in Guinea, United States and Canada.
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Amanda Cordner
Amanda Cordner is an award-winning theatre creator and playwright whose acclaimed play Body So Fluorescent toured Canada, was published and produced by Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. On screen, Amanda is best known for their award-nominated breakthrough role as 7ven in CBC/HBO Max’s Sort Of, additional credits: Slo Pitch (Crave) and The Expanse (Amazon)
Lisa Karen Cox
Lisa Karen Cox is a Toronto-based cross-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of theatre, dance, embodiment and language. Often playing men and mythic creatures, her performance and creative practice are grounded in decolonial frameworks, inclusive pedagogies, and a commitment to centering global majority, and queer perspectives.
Lisa works as a Director in collaborative creation processes. For the stage, credits include: Now You See Her (Quote/Unquote Collective/WhyNotTheatre/Nightwood), Windrush (FOLDA); Uncovering Roots (DéPOT); and Swans / The Swan—a decolonial reimagining of Swan Lake centering queer and global majority experiences.
Lisa also works as an Intimacy Director (including A Strange Loop, Flex, Table for Two, Post Democracy) and as a Movement Director (Enormity, Hamlet). Lisa’s directing credits include Doubt and Intimate Apparel (Thousand Islands Playhouse); 1851: Spirit and Voice (Soulpepper/Myseum); Anna Karenina (UTM/Sheridan)and Beyere (CBC Gem/Obsidian Theatre).
Rodney Diverlus
​Rodney Diverlus is a Haitian-Canadian award-winning artist and producer whose practice straddles media: film, theatre, dance, digital media, print, and public arts-based interventions. They use the body and voice—as media and vessel—to host movement, text, rhythm, storytelling, and protest. Their work flaunts emergent representations of blackness, queerness, diasporic life, and freedom. Their work has been presented internationally. Diverlus is a best-selling author and co-founder of Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism and Black Lives Matter—Canada.
Nickeshia Garrick
Nickeshia Garrick is a settler on the stolen land of Tsi Tkarón:to (Toronto) and has performed on this land for over 25 years. They are unapologetically a Black, Queer Performing Artist who believes in the healing power of breath through raw emotion, movement and storytelling. Nickeshia is an award-winning and multi-nominated artist who holds a BFA in Dance from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) and is currently working on the next iteration of her solo work, the ties that Bind us, the ties that Bond us, which will be part of DanceWorks 2026-27 Season.
Nadine Grant
Nadine is a costume designer, educator and emerging costume concept illustrator. Recent notable designs include “The Amen Corner” (Shaw Festival), “Treemonisha” (Volcano), “Little Women” and “Serving Elizabeth” (Stratford Festival).
Nadine has been a tenure track professor at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois, and Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. She is currently Head of Wardrobe and Costume Design at the University of Waterloo. Nadine has a passion for mentoring new designers with a special focus on young designers of color.
Nadine holds an MFA in Costume Design and Technology from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, Missouri. She is the proud past recipient of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) Costume Design and Technology Award, Stratford Festival’s Ian and Molly Lindsay Young Design Fellowship, and most recently the Stratford Festival’s Guthrie Award.
Dr. Janelle Joseph
Dr. Janelle Joseph is an internationally recognized and award-winning storyteller and scholar committed to disseminating knowledge about racial justice, health, and sport.
Dr. Joseph is the Founder and Director of the IDEAS Research Lab, and Co-Founder of the Re-Creation Collective, and CEWMA International Research Group, all driving research related to healthy physical activity. Dr. Joseph is devoted to seeing graduate students and early career researchers flourish in community-based research using qualitative, ethnographic, and embodied decolonial praxis. Dr. Joseph’s nation-leading scholarship, including over $4 million in research grant funding, over 100 conference presentations, over 50 articles and book chapters, and three books related to social justice, helps to answer the question: “What new health, sport, and recreation policies and practices might emerge if we focused less on including particular ‘kinds of people’ and more on removing the structural, cultural, and administrative barriers that currently shape our movement cultures and ambitions?”
Dr. Joseph is a faculty affiliate with the Social Justice Research Institute and Canada-Caribbean Institute at Brock University, Adjunct Professor in Leisure Studies at Dalhousie University, and status-only Associate Professor in Kinesiology and Physical Education at University of Toronto.
Dr. Joseph’s work is situated at the intersection of Black Studies, Health Sciences and Sport Management to enable storytelling about uninhibited joy, abiding colonialism, and steadfast resistance of racialized peoples.
Sue-Tanya Lee
Sue-Tanya Lee is an Afro-Jamaican theatre producer, creator, and cultural leader committed to developing work by artists from marginalized communities and creating space for bold, multidisciplinary storytelling. Her practice brings together artistic development, production, and organizational leadership, with a focus on building the conditions for artists and creative teams to thrive.
Her leadership is grounded in care, cultural responsibility, and a commitment to expanding whose stories are told, how they are told, and who has the opportunity to shape the process.
She continues to develop a practice that connects creative possibility with practical leadership, supporting the growth of both individual projects and the broader cultural ecosystems in which they exist.
Motion
​MOTION is an award-winning screenwriter, playwright, poet and emcee. A multidisciplinary artist, her work fuses word, sound & drama for the stage, page and screen. She is co-writer of the award-winning feature Akilla’s Escape with director Charles Officer, which debuted at TIFF, and garnered five Canadian Screen Awards including Best Original Screenplay. In TV, Motion is a writer on dramatic series such as Coroner, Diggstown and Sainte Pierre. As a writer, she’s also featured on France TV’s animated music series Behind the Beats, Robyn Hood, and as a writer/co-executive producer on Revenge of the Black Best Friend. Her productions include the Dora-nominated Oraltorio: A Theatrical Mixtape with DJ L’Oqenz, and Rebirth of the Afronauts, in 21 Black Futures (Obsidian/CBCGem). Published in Motion in Poetry, The Black Notes and Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature, Motion is Course Director of Griots to Emcees: Culture, Performance & Spoken Word at York University, and is creator of the upcoming performance/interview series Speak OurStory.
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Emily Radcliffe
Emily Radcliffe is a Canadian Singer-Songwriter, Performer, Playwright, Producer, and Director of Barbadian and Jamaican heritage. She is a 2023 graduate of the University of Waterloo's Honours Theatre and Performance and Business program. As a multidisciplinary artist with nearly 20 years of training and experience, Emily's work has been featured across various physical and digital stages including, City of Toronto, Midtown Radio, DiverseWorks Dance Co., Buffalo AKG Art Gallery, Media That Matters, K-W Art Gallery, Black And Free Research-Creation Project, Green Light Arts, University of Waterloo, Intermission Magazine, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, and both CBC Radio Ottawa and CBC Radio Kitchener-Waterloo. In August 2026, Emily recently produced a New Play Development Workshop and two Public Staged Readings of her original Afro-futuristic play entitled “One And The Same” in Studio 180 at the University of Waterloo. Emily is also a 2025 recipient of the OAC Recommender's Grant for Theatre Creators, towards the development of her play, "One and the Same." Emily gives many thanks to Dr. Naila and the Black And Free team for the immense privilege to take part in this incredible project again.
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Jaimie Salih
​Jaimie Salih is a Masters of Social Work student at Western University. Her areas and populations of interest include: mental health, neurodiversity, and equity healthcare settings. She is currently a Project Coordinator of Black And Free and teaching assistant at the University of Waterloo.
Maya Ward
Maya Ward (she/her) is a Toronto-based actor and aspiring filmmaker whose work explores relationships, culture, and identity. Currently studying Performance Acting at Toronto Metropolitan University, she looks forward to graduating in 2027. Maya is drawn to characters who are messy and layered, and stories that explore the complexities of the human experience. She hopes to bring honesty and curiosity to her work on stage and screen.
Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware
​Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware is Assistant Professor at the School of the Arts, McMaster University, exploring social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. He is a Vanier scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, and educator, with works presented across Canada and internationally. Ware is part of the Black August Arts Residency Collective, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter–Canada, curator of the That’s So Gay show, and author of numerous papers, articles, and books. He is co-editor of the best-selling “Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada” (URP, 2020).
Ravyn Wngz
The Black Widow of Burlesque is an Afro-Indigenous, 2Spirit, Queer and Transcendent multidisciplinary art maker, curator and empowerment storyteller. Her work is rooted in abolition and expressed through movement theater, political education, cultural research, DEI consultancy, and many forms of disability justice. She is a Canadian Best Selling Author (Until We Are Free), received the Stratford Festival mid career artist award 2021, named Top 25 Women of Influence in Canada recipient of 2021, and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee 2021 (with Black Lives Matter). Ravyn has lectured widely on topics such as abolition, art & activism, accessibility, LGBT inclusion, leadership, policy, and land-based informed policies at Deloitte Canada, University of Virginia Dept of Anthropology, UCLA School of Architecture and Urban design, McMaster University, University of Toronto School of Law Faculty, Faculty at the Toronto District School Board, Toronto Catholic School Board, and Canada's National Ballet School.