TDS Teachers and Staff | Department of English & Drama

TDS @ UTM Faculty

Miriam Fernandes (Adjunct Professor, Acting)

Miriam Fernandes is an award-winning artist who has worked as an actor, director and theatre-maker around the world. She is the Co-Artistic Director of Why Not Theatre, an international company based in Toronto, widely celebrated for its work at the intersection of equity and innovation.

Miriam is the co-creator and co-writer of Mahabharata (Why Not Theatre/Shaw Festival/Barbican London), and is a co-writer and performer in What You Won’t Do for Love with Drs. David Suzuki and Tara Cullis. Directing credits include Sangen fra Verdens Ende (The National Stage, Bergen, Norway), The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs (Stratford Festival Meighen Forum), Metamorphoses (CDTPS), Hayavadana (Soulpepper Theatre), and Nesen (MiniMidiMaxi Festival, Norway).

Miriam is currently in development for a number of new works including an adaptation of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. She is also working as a director with Den National Scene (The National Stage of Norway, in Bergen) on a series of new plays that are being released from 2025-2026.

In 2025 Miriam received the Dora Mavor Moore award for Best Performance by an Individual in Mahabharata as well as the Dora Award for Best New Play and Best Production for Mahabharata. In the same year the production was also awarded Best New Canadian Work and Best New Production of a Play at the Toronto Critics Choice Awards. Miriam was also named the 2025 Siminovitch Protégé.

Miriam’s plays have been turned into films, published and produced across Canada, the UK, Australia and Norway. She has studied with Anne Bogart’s SITI Company and is a graduate of Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

Peter Fernandes (Adjunct Professor, Acting)

Peter Fernandes is a multidisciplinary theatre artist based in Toronto. A three-time Dora Mavor Moore Award recipient and Toronto Theatre Award winner, he is also an inaugural recipient of the Philip Akin Black Shoulders Legacy Award.

As a performer, Peter has appeared in leading roles on major stages across the country. Select theatre credits include Fat Ham (Canadian Stage); Bidding War, The Master Plan, Fifteen Dogs (Crow’s Theatre); One Man, Two Guvnors, The Importance of Being Earnest, Damn Yankees, Charley’s Aunt, A Christmas Carol, The Russian Play, Brigadoon (Shaw Festival); Almost a Full Moon, Peter and the Starcatcher (Citadel Theatre); Rose, Father Comes Home From the Wars, Alligator Pie, Incident at Vichy, The Just, Marat/Sade, The Dybbuk, Spoon River, Tartuffe, The Crucible, Idiot’s Delight (Soulpepper); Vietgone (RMTC); Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love & Information, Twelfth Night, King Lear (Canadian Stage); Jerusalem (Outside the March/Company Theatre); You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown! (MTYP); Onegin (NAC/Musical Stage); and Passing Strange (Musical Stage/Obsidian). Screen credits include Karate Ghost, The Unexpected Reunion, God of Frogs, 21 Black Futures, Pretty Hard Cases, Odd Squad: Mobile Unit, and voice work for Dasher and Mass Effect: Andromeda.

As a director and creative collaborator, his work spans classical theatre, new play development, and theatrical illusion design. He is currently directing Sleuth at the Shaw Festival. Additional credits include Assistant Director on Octet, A Strange Loop, and Wights (Crow’s Theatre); Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart and Witness for the Prosecution (Shaw Festival). He has served as Illusions Assistant on The Witches (National Theatre/West End workshop) and Fat Ham (Broadway), and as Magic Consultant on Bremen Town (Tarragon Theatre), Trident Moon (Crow’s Theatre), and Snow in Midsummer (Shaw Festival).

Peter hosted the 45th Anniversary Dora Mavor Moore Awards, Canada’s oldest and largest professional theatre, dance, and opera awards ceremony. He previously served as the Metcalf Foundation Artistic Director Intern at Crow’s Theatre and is a graduate of the Shaw Festival’s Neil Munro Intern Directors Program, the Canadian Guild of Stage Directors and Choreographers Associates Program, the Soulpepper Academy, and the University of Alberta’s BFA Acting Program.

He is currently the Artistic Associate at Crow’s Theatre and Vice President of Driftwood Theatre’s Board of Directors.

Alexis Milligan (Adjunct Professor, Movement)

Canadian actor, movement specialist and director Alexis Milligan practices and teaches a diverse range of work from theatre and film to movement direction and puppetry. Currently, she is the resident Movement Director at the Shaw Festival, host of the “Let’s Get This Shaw on The Road” podcast, and the director of the ground-breaking Theatre of Medicine program, created in partnership with the Canadian Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Alexis is a much sought after teacher and arts educator. Her unique approach blends the arts and science by sharing knowledge through experiential learning - which simply means learning through doing. She holds a diploma in Classical Performance from George Brown Theatre School, a diploma in University Teaching from Renaissance College, and a master’s in interdisciplinary studies, combining the performing arts, communication, education, and neuroscience, from the University of New Brunswick.

She has served as a consultant for the Canadian Medical Protective Association and has sat on the steering committees for the Canadian Network of Imagination and Creativity and the Atlantic Centre for Creativity, as well as host of the “Finding Creativity” podcast. Alexis is a regular guest teacher at NYU Tisch School for the Performing Arts, The Verbier Festival, The European Association of Urology (TIP Program), Dalhousie University School of Nursing, and University of New Brunswick, School of Nursing.

To find out more about Alexis’ work visit alexismilligan.com.

Janine Pearson (Adjunct Professor, Voice)

Presently in her 36th season as a voice and text coach with the Stratford Festival, Janine Pearson spent 24 seasons as Head of Voice and Coaching, leading a multidisciplinary team of professional coaches serving the needs of the acting company working in repertory; created the Voice Care and Development Workshop for Educators^©; co-created the Toronto 5 project; and taught for Stratford's Education department and Langham Director’s Workshop. Since 2021 she is pleased to guide the Birmingham Conservatory.

Away from the Stratford Festival, she spent a decade as Head of Voice and Associate Artistic Director of the English acting and playwriting program at the National Theatre School of Canada; taught at the University of Regina, University of Windsor, TMU, University of Waterloo and HB Studios (NYC); and is working with colleagues nationwide to grow a National Voice Association (www.anv-nva.ca).

Janine is a graduate of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (London); Humboldt-Institut (Germany); and the University of Regina.

Online: janinepearson.ca.

Jacob Gallagher-Ross (Associate Professor)

A scholar, critic, and dramaturg, Jacob Gallagher-Ross’s research and teaching interests focus on experimental and avant-garde theatre, dramaturgy, theories of acting, and theatre in the post-Internet era. He is the author of the book Theaters of the Everyday, and many articles and essays in leading journals such as Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theater, TDR, and PAJ. A contributing editor of Theater—Yale’s journal of theatre criticism, reportage, and new plays—he co-edited three special issues about theatre and digital culture.

For many years, he was a theatre critic for the Village Voice in New York City, with over 120 published reviews. He also wrote criticism for other major US publications. (You can read his Voice reviews here.)

He worked for several seasons as a dramaturg at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where his credits include The Tempest (with Christopher Plummer as Prospero), Henry V, Twelfth Night, The Matchmaker, and Cymbeline. Both The Tempest and Twelfth Night were made into feature films and can be screened on the Stratford Festival’s website.

He was the content consultant for Crash Course: Theater and Drama, a fifty-episode web series about theatre history produced by Crash Course and PBS Digital that has been viewed by more than two million people around the world.

Currently, he is collaborating with the NYC experimental performance ensemble Big Art Group on the first book devoted to their work, co-editing the first collection of Macarthur “genius” director Annie Dorsen’s algorithmic theatre writings and performance texts, and co-writing a book about interface theatre. (What is interface theatre, you ask? You can read about his recent award-winning research about theatre, surveillance, and big data here.)

Maria Hupfield (Associate Professor)

Maria Hupfield is the Canada Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts. Her work has been at the cutting edge of art and public engagement for many years, from her early work as founder of 7th Generation Image Makers, Native Child + Family Services of Toronto, forging partnerships with the Art Gallery of Ontario, Charles Street Video, and ImagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, and the Toronto Indigenous community to recent collaborative performances with musicians and artists including her commission of five multimedia projects for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche (2017).

Hupfield was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation prize for outstanding achievement by a Canadian mid-career artist (2018). Her first major institutional solo exhibition The One Who Keeps on Giving was a production of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, in partnership with Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal; Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax; and the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris (2017-18). Her work has shown in New York at the Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; represented Canada at SITE Santa Fe (2016), and travelled nationally across Canada with Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-14). Recent performances include Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Para\\el Performance Gallery in Brooklyn, and Gibney Dance. Hupfield is a Guest Curator, Artist of Color Council Movement Research at Judson Church Fall 2019/Winter 2020 Season. Her upcoming solo Nine Years Towards The Sun opens at the Heard Museum, Phoenix December (2019). Together with her husband artist Jason Lujan she co-owns Native Art Department International.

For more on her extensive activities, see her website.

Signy Lynch (Assistant Professor)

Signy Lynch researches topics including Canadian theatre by Global Majority artists, theatre audiences, and theatre criticism. She regularly teaches classes on subjects such as Canadian theatre, audience studies, global and diasporic theatres, political theatre, and theatre criticism.

She also co-leads the Toronto Fringe's New Young Reviewers program, which helps emerging theatre writers to hone their craft. This work is part of her creative practice as a critical dramaturg, where she seeks to push the boundaries of traditional theatre criticism to imagine critical and creative practices that can reflect our digital and intercultural present and futures.

Her writing has appeared in places including the scholarly journals Theatre Research in Canada, Contemporary Theatre Review, Canadian Theatre Review, Comedy Studies, and New Theatre Quarterly, and magazines alt.theatre, CdnTimes, and Intermission Magazine. She is co-editor of Canadian Theatre Review volume 186, “Theatre After the Explosion” (Spring 2021) and the forthcoming Testifyin’: African Canadian Plays, Volume 3, with Djanet Sears (Playwrights Canada Press, 2027). She is currently developing a book manuscript, Theatres of Relation, based on her SSHRC-funded dissertation, which won York University’s Barbara Godard Prize for best dissertation in Canadian Studies (2021), and helped her to secure a prestigious Governor General’s Gold Academic Medal (2022).

She is co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (centreforspectatorship.com).

Martin Revermann (Professor)

Martin Revermann is a classical philologist and cultural historian, with particular interests in theatre (especially ancient Greek and 20th-century European theatre), translation, and Bertolt Brecht. Specific areas of research include performance criticism, iconography and sociology of Greek drama; the cultural history of Greek theatre from antiquity to the 21st century; the dramatic and lyric work of Bertolt Brecht; the history, theory and practices of translation (esp. that of Greek and Latin texts); the role of theatre and performance in the history of science; and exploring the interfaces between theatre and religion. Major focal points of his research have been Greek comedy (notably Aristophanes), tragedy as a dynamic art form, theatre theory as well as the work of Bertolt Brecht.

Revermann's award-winning doctoral research was the foundation of Comic Business. Theatrically, Dramatic Technique and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy (Oxford 2006). He has edited or co-edited five other books: Performance, Iconography, Reception. Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin (Oxford 2008), Beyond the Fifth Century: Interactions with Greek Tragedy from the Fourth Century BCE to the Middle Ages (Berlin/New York 2010), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy (Cambridge 2014), A Cultural History of Theatre (Vol. 1: Antiquity) (London 2017) and Semiotics in Action (Brno 2020). His latest monograph is Brecht and Tragedy: Radicalism, Traditionalism, Eristics (Cambridge 2022).

Leticia Ridley (Assistant Professor)

Leticia L. Ridley is the Canada Research Chair in Black Theatre and Performance. Her teaching and research focus on African American theatre and performance, performance theory, the intersections of sports and performance, and Black digital studies.

She is the co-creator, co-producer, and co-host of Daughters of Lorraine, a Black feminist theatre podcast supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons, and a recurring co-host of On Tap: A Theatre & Performance Studies Podcast. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Ridley is an active freelance dramaturg, with experience collaborating with theatres in California, Georgia, Maryland, and New York.

Outside the classroom, she enjoys playing video games, watching sports, and attending live music events. In the future, she hopes to develop a theatre history video game inspired by Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, blending education and play to engage new audiences in theatre history.

Lawrence Switzky (Associate Professor)

Lawrence Switzky researches and writes about modern and contemporary drama and theatre. He also works with theatre artists in Canada and around the world to create new plays. For the past five years, he has been the co-editor-in-chief of an academic journal, Modern Drama, the most prominent scholarly publication in English to focus on dramatic literature after 1850. He regularly teaches courses and runs events with the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. He is working as a dramaturg with a wonderful Canadian playwright, Matthew MacKenzie, and several artists in South Africa on a play about vervet monkeys and climate change. He is also completing a book and some short films with Handspring Puppet Company in South Africa about their art and global impact since they designed and constructed the larger-than-life-size horse puppets in War Horse.

Recently, he and Karen Fricker worked with Toronto’s Why Not Theatre to make a book about their two-part production of The Mahabharata with Coach House Press. He has also recently completed a book with a colleague at the University of Toronto, Marlene Goldman, and a neurologist at Harvard University, Alice Flaherty, called Medicine as Theatre/Theatre as Medicine. By examining the longstanding relationship between theatre and medicine and the performative aspects of medical care today, they propose that clinical medical encounters are always already inter-active and dynamic and that the contact that occurs between patient, doctor, and caregiver makes illness an ensemble drama.

Holger Syme (Professor)

Holger Syme is a theatre historian whose research focusses on the theatre of Shakespeare's time in England and on 20th- and 21st-century European performance, especially productions of "classics." He has published two books on early modern English theatre, Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare's England: A Culture of Mediation (Cambridge, 2012) and Theatre History, Attribution Studies, and the Question of Evidence (Cambridge, 2023), and co-edited a third: Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583-1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing (Ashgate, 2009). His essays have appeared in many leading journals, and he wrote the theatre-historical introduction for the Norton Shakespeare (2015), for which he also edited two plays, Edward III and The Book of Sir Thomas More. His current project is a major book charting the history of Shakespeare performances in Berlin from 1920-2020.

He also occasionally works as a director and adaptor of plays; the Howland Company's production of his translation/co-adaptation of Ödön von Horváth's Casimir and Caroline won two Dora Mavor Moore Awards in 2020, and he recently adapted Ben Jonson's The Alchemist for TDS. Many of his publications can be found on his website; he also used to be an avid blogger.

Natasha Vashisht (Sessional Lecturer II)

TDS @ UTM Theatre Staff

Mike Slater (Manager, Theatre Operations)

Mike studied Music Performance and Technology at Thames Valley University in Reading, England. Following that, he worked as the Deputy Electrician at the New Theatre in Oxford, England, before joining Disney Cruise Line in 2010, where he spent 5 years as a Senior Technician and Technical Production Manager. Mike immigrated to Canada in 2013 where he became part of the technical team at Drayton Entertainment. Mike is currently the Manager of Theatre Operations at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where he has also designed lighting for over 20 mainstage productions.

Joe Taylor (Production Manager)

Joe Taylor is the Production Manager for TDS and has also worked as sound and projection designer on many TDS productions over the past 12 years. Working through musicals and dramas has given him the knowledge and experience to merge creative and technical elements in our shows, including The Mill on the Floss, Metamorphoses, The Hobbit, and Alcestis, among many others.

Rachael Liness (Technical Director)

Sarah Scroggie (Technical Director)

Sarah is responsible for most areas concerning set construction within TDS. She has always loved to build and create things. There was not enough creating going on in first-year engineering, so she went to the Theatre Department at the University of Guelph and begged them to give her something to build. From there she graduated with a BSc in Computer Science and a BA in Drama with an emphasis in Theatre Production and Design. She has had many jobs in theatre production, from Head Carpenter to Props Master, Painter to Lighting Technician to Technical Director. She has designed over 20 sets for 7 different theatres, and regularly designs sets for TDS as well.

Michelle Vanderheyden (Head of Wardrobe)

Michelle is TDS’s Head of Wardrobe and resident costume designer. She comes from a background of designing and wardrobe management at Theatre Aquarius (15 seasons) as well as designing for various other companies. For TDS, she costumed a student creation, In the Midst of Alarms, in 2014 and has been the resident costume designer since 2016. Previous costume designs include Miss Saigon, Sweet Charity, South Pacific (Drayton Entertainment); Sylvia, The Sound of Music, Dreamgirls, CATS, Oklahoma!, and Red (Theatre Aquarius). She has made costumes for the Banff Centre of the Arts, Shaw Festival, Stratford Festival, Mirvish Productions, and Livent.

Leslie Wright (Head of Props)

Leslie serves as Head of Props and Scenic Art for TDS, where she regularly designs sets for our mainstage productions. A graduate of York University’s Theatre Production program, Leslie has worked throughout the GTA as a designer, props builder, and scenic painter. A versatile artist, Leslie has worked on productions ranging from touring children’s theatre to corporate décor and event installation. She has spent many seasons working as a guest designer and instructor for Etobicoke School of the Arts, designing musicals including Cabaret, CATS, Rent, and Anne of Green Gables. In addition to her passion for the theatre, Leslie is an Ontario Certified Teacher and currently works with the Peel District School Board.