Hey, yes, Elio. Hi. I hate making websites and bios, but I love making plays and poems.

A prairie-born queer, I am originally from Treaty 1 territory, and am now based on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

My artistic work and practice have gone through many iterations over the last 20 years of doing this thing.  

When I was a teenager, every few months a recurring group of pals and I would log on to the Dramatists Play Service website, scroll through the hundreds of plays, come to a consensus on one and then put it on. We’d find rooms within which to rehearse, spaces in Winnipeg’s Exchange District within which to perform, we’d make or thrift our own sets and props and costumes, hang some janky lights, set up our own chairs and sell $5.00 tickets to our friends and family. We’d make enough cash to cover our minimal costs, with a little left over to buy ourselves some cheap beers at the Woodbine after each show. We didn’t know that we were “producing” theatre. We just knew that we wanted to tell stories and practice things like acting and directing.

My early 20s were a space for first investigating and exploring devised theatre, performance art and interdisciplinary creation. With theatre school peers and other collaborators, I developed highly imaginative and earnestly experimental shows blending and exploding curiosities about things like time travel, fine dining, quintessential neo soul albums, gender dysphoria and Chekhov.

In my late 20s I found myself in conversations with several theatre arts leaders in Winnipeg discussing a lack of queer and trans representation in their programming. By nearly each of these arts leaders, I was urged to write the play myself. And so, without really planning to, but having some cash thrown my way to do so, I started writing plays.  

Recent time has found me embracing the confluence of each of these phases. Getting back to my indie production roots, being supported by different institutions in the development of new plays, crafting live performance experiences that weave together various disciplines and theatrical traditions, all the while being acutely dedicated to story, character, social justice and my relationship to audience.   

My work in the last several years ranges from the classic family drama, to absurd metatheatrical surrealism, to hybrid poetry-performance play texts, to live analog projections design in a play for queer and trans teens about zines, Shakespeare and resistance. 

It has been funded, developed and produced by companies across the country (including the Manitoba Association of Playwrights, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Theatre Projects Manitoba, the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Rumble Theatre, Manitoba Theatre for Young People, Theatre Outré, WhatLab, Theatre Replacement, the Historic Joy Kogawa House, Festival Antigonish Summer Theatre, Page 1 Theatre and the National Queer and Trans Playwriting Unit) and is constantly in a state of interrogation and disruption, taking on new forms, and rediscovering what it most wants to be.

As a trans, disabled, and neurodivergent artist, my work is inherently political, and I stand & advocate passionately for the rights of all oppressed peoples. From Turtle Island to Palestine and everywhere in between, I know that no one is free until everyone is free.

Right now, I’m coming to the end of my thesis and in a few months will receive my MFA in Creative Writing & Theatre from the University of British Columbia.

I also like to read, run, teach, beach, and hang.