CURRENT ARTISTIC TEAM
Tara Goldstein
Founder, Artistic Director, Artist Researcher, Producer, Artist Researcher Creation Unit
Tara Goldstein is the Founder and current Co-Artistic Director of Gailey Road Productions. She graduated from the MFA Playwriting Program at Spalding University, Louisville, Kentucky, in November 2006. Tara is also a professor, researcher and playwright in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
Tara’s 2021 play Out at School written with Jenny Salisbury and Pam Baer is a verbatim theatre piece based on interviews undertaken with LGBTQ families about their experiences at school. Out at School is available as an audio-play at Gailey Road Audio on popular podcast platforms.
Tara’s most recent play The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays with Alec Butler and Jenny Salisbury will be performed at the 2023 Toronto Pride Festival. Tara’s first novel Home of Her Heart was published by Tellwell Publishing in April 2023.
Jenny Salisbury
Co-Artistic Director, Director, Playwright, Artist Researcher Creation Unit
Jenny Salisbury is the Co-Artistic Director of Gailey Road Productions and a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education where she is working with Tara Goldstein as a dramaturge on a verbatim theatre project called 60 Years of Queer and Trans Activism. Jenny is also a theatre director and arts-based researcher who specializes in new play development. For over 20 years, Jenny has worked with playwrights, actors, and theatre ensembles to create new plays with a rich emotional tapestry, and a strong justice ethic, rooted in physical theatre traditions. Jenny’s PhD thesis (2021) examined the relationship between community-engaged theatre and its audiences, and she is currently a director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research, an international research community dedicated to producing new research on theatre spectatorship.
Pam Baer
Director, Playwright, Artist Researcher
Pam Baer works with Gailey Road Productions as a Director, Playwright, and Artist Researcher. Pam is a theatre and filmmaker with a focus on community-engaged work. Using artistic practice as a form of critical pedagogy to share stories and build dialogue, Pam has worked on applied arts projects with wide-reaching themes in community and school settings. Pam has a Ph.D. in Education from The Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
Doug Friesen
Musician, Sound Editor, Artist Researcher
Douglas Friesen is a teacher, musician, and researcher based in Toronto, Canada. He has led teachers, students, musicians, and other interested folks across Canada and Latin America through ways of using listening and sound to engage creativity and facilitate community. He is a PHD candidate researching critical sound and listening pedagogies and has taught music education courses at various institutions including the University of Toronto. As a musician Doug has played with Selina Martin, Kate Reid, Dave Bidini, and John K Samson.
benjamin lee hicks
Visual artist, Artist Researcher, Artist Researcher Creation Unit
benjamin lee hicks, PhD (they/them) is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the FLOURISH Collective in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. They are also a visual artist, elementary school teacher, and sessional instructor for Elementary Arts Education in the Master of Teaching program at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. benjamin completed their PhD in Curriculum and Pedagogy (OISE/UT) in June, 2022. Their dissertation contains a series of graphic stories, which aim to centre the educational experiences of trans/gender diverse (GD) people in ways that are different from how we have been centred-out by others (To Do This Discussion Differently: Queering Teacher Professional Learning Through Comic Art and Graphic Stories). Visual communication and creative expression are integral to every aspect of benjamin’s professional practice because sharing stories and being deeply, intentionally present with others when they offer to share theirs is one important way that humans can enact greater care in the places/spaces we travel.
benjamin has had the very good fortune of working closely with several research collectives over their academic career thus far, including: The LGBTQ+ Families in Schools Project (OISE/University of Toronto, 2015-2022), The Addressing Injustices Project (OISE/University of Toronto, 2015-2020), and QTPiE (Queer and Trans People in Education, University of Vermont, 2021-2022). As a teacher and educational researcher, benjamin has written and designed curriculum on topics of sustainable community building, queering school space, arts-based activism, and comic art as pedagogy. These publications and others can be found at www.benjaminleehicks.com/blh-publications. To see more of benjamin’s work in visual art, elementary education, and educational research, please visit: www.benjaminleehicks.com.
Kate Reid
Composer, Musician, Artist Researcher, Artist Researcher Creation Unit
Slam-storytelling meets many a queer-themed tune in the music of singer-songwriter and whip smart wordsmith, Kate Reid, who combines musical activism with public pedagogy. Kate facilitates workshops, gives concerts, and delivers musical keynote addresses for universities and colleges, public schools, conferences, and community service organizations on 2SLGBTQI+ perspectives.
With a Ph.D in Education from the University of Toronto, Kate is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University, where they are a co-applicant on a three-year, SSHRC-funded, arts-based research project with newcomer and refugee children. This project examines how songwriting, recording, and performance provide opportunities for newcomer and refugee children to experience personal empowerment and express musical agency by composing and recording their stories in song. As part of this research, Kate uses an innovative, participatory research creation method they developed called, “collaborative ethnographic songwriting.” A robust method for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating research data through music, collaborative ethnographic songwriting supports underserved people and communities to narrate and document their lived experiences, perspectives, and stories in recorded song. katereid.net
The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays Research Team
Bronwyn Garden-Smith
Artist Researcher
The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays Research Team.
Bronwyn Garden-Smith (she/they) is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, where she studied Psychology, Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity, and English. She has actively contributed to on- and off-campus equity initiatives, including the Equity Studies Students’ Union, Abolition Book Club, and OpenYrPurse, a grassroots digital mutual aid youth collective. She is currently focussed on how individuals can use principles of transformative justice to facilitate interpersonal healing, build capacity, and strengthen political movements.
Bronwyn has contributed to Dr. Goldstein’s Gender. Sexuality. School. and The Love Booth projects. She previously founded and edited the Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity Undergraduate journal, ROVE, and assisted Dr. Nina Sokolovic with meta-analytic research on the topic of whether empathy can be taught to adults.
As a poet, writer of fiction, and editor, she dreams of joining the vibrant community of people creating contemporary literatures on the land currently known as “Canada”. She is particularly interested in how having access to stories that speak to one’s own subjectivity can be a profound source of resilience.
Kohle Handelman-Kerman
Artist Researcher
The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays Research Team.
Kohle (they/she) is an undergraduate student completing an Honours Bachelor of Science with a Psychology Specialist and a Sexual Diversity Studies Minor. As an emerging queer-identified researcher, they strive to create an empathetic and grounded research praxis focusing on Queer and Trans issues. They recently had a literature review of Transgender Mental Health Care published in Arbor, the University of Toronto’s Undergraduate Research Journal. They are looking towards graduate studies in public health.
Dr. Bishop Owis
Artist Researcher, Artist Researcher Creation Unit
The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays Research Team.
Bishop (they/them) is an educator, community activist and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy where they work with SOGI UBC. They are first-generation born and raised on the unceded territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples of Tkaranto (Toronto, ON) by immigrant parents with mixed ancestry from Guyana (Indo-Guyanese), Egypt, Italy China and Portugal.
They are a graduate from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) where they received their PhD researching how educators understand their own ethical commitments of care when working with queer and trans youth of colour. Their research explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, race and colonialism in education using care work and solidarity pedagogies that inform a sense of collective imagination; one that strives for queer futurity, world-building and thriving.
60 YEARS OF QUEER AND TRANS ACTIVISM AND CARE RESEARCH TEAM
Jenny Salisbury
Co-Artistic Director, Research Team Manager (2022-2024)
Jenny Salisbury is the Co-Artistic Director of Gailey Road Productions. She is a theatre director who specializes in new play development. Her Ph.D. (2021) is in community-engaged theatre and audiences. For over 20 years, Jenny has worked with playwrights, actors, and theatre ensembles to create new plays with a rich emotional tapestry, and a strong justice ethic, rooted in physical theatre traditions. Jenny is also a director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research, an international research community dedicated to producing new research on theatre spectatorship.
University of Toronto Research Opportunity (ROP) Students (2022-2023)
Mitzi Badlis, Julia Chapman, Chika Duru, Giovanna El Warrak, Mia Jakobsen, Jiaying (Cherise) Pan, Shakira Ram, Anya Shen, Vivian Wang
Advisory Board
Pam Baer
Pam Baer works with Gailey Road Productions as a Director, Playwright, and Artist Researcher. Pam is a theatre and filmmaker with a focus on community-engaged work. Using artistic practice as a form of critical pedagogy to share stories and build dialogue, Pam has worked on applied arts projects with wide-reaching themes in community and school settings. Pam has a Ph.D. in Education from The Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
Margot Huycke
Margot Huycke has been advising Gailey Road Productions since its inception January 2007. She has worked as the Producer of our Women Writing Letters literary performance series. The series ran for four seasons from 2011-2014 and in the fall of 2016 hosted a fundraiser for The CASA Award. Margot has also worked as a producer for several Gailey Road productions including the 2019 Pride performance run of Out at School. Margot taught geography at Danforth Collegiate and Technical Institute in Toronto and is an avid recreational hockey player.
Bessie Giannikos
Bessie Giannikos has been advising Gailey Road on grant proposals and production budgets since its inception in January 2007. Bessie is currently the Manager, Finance & Administration in the Department of Curriculum Teaching and Learning at University of Toronto.
gaileyroad@gmail.com
productions
Where research meets theatre and theatre meets research.