Originally from Northern Ireland, Gareth Williams is a Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art. His compositions seek to find new participants, collaborators and audiences for new opera and music theatre, to shed light on stories and communities that have been overlooked, and to explore ideas of vulnerability in vocal writing.

William...

Iman Habibi, D.M.A. (University of Michigan), is an Iranian-Canadian composer and pianist, and a founding member of the piano duo ensemble Piano Pinnacle.

Hailed as “a giant in talent” (the Penticton Herald), “whose technical mastery is matched by his musical and cultural literacy” (Hudson-Housatonic Arts), Iman has been commissioned by The B...

Leanna Brodie is an actor, playwright, and translator whose passions include lifting up the stories and voices of women, exploring and exploding the ever-widening rural-urban divide, as well as championing a new generation of French-Canadian playwrights by transmitting their extraordinary theatrical visions into the English language.

David James Brock is a screenwriter, playwright, poet, and opera librettist with national and international production history. He won the 2011 Herman Voaden Canadian National Playwriting Award for his play Wet, which was nominated for three Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards in 2019. Brock is the author of two poetry collections, Everyone is CO2 ...

Jovanni Sy is a Canadian playwright, actor, and director with Chinese-Filipino ancestry. Sy was born in Manila, and grew up in Toronto, Ontario. He studied engineering at the University of Toronto before deciding to become an actor, and studied with RH Thomson.

For twenty years, he was active in the Toronto theatre community. From 2004-2009, h...

Debi is an interdisciplinary performance artist who loves to weave together sound, text, movement and technology to create contemporary stories. Her performances have been recognized as “unique and magical” (Rondo Classic) and “electric, poignant” (Schmopera). Debi is also the founding artistic director of re:Naissance Opera in Vancouver, BC. Wi...

Marjorie was born in Toronto to Hong Kong immigrants who arrived in the late 60s. As a theatre and opera artist, she works variously as writer, director and dramaturge as well as in the intersection of these forms and roles. Her work has been seen and performed in the United States, Scotland, Hong Kong, Russia and across Canada. Her full-length ...

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Ivan Barbotin began playing guitar at 10. Within a couple of years, he formed the rock band Sphinx which soon won the “Soviet Union’s Best Youth Band” competition. At 16, he joined Russia’s celebrated rock band Forum as lead guitarist, where he was half the age of the other musicians. With Forum he toured the coun...