Bio

Graham W. Lea is a scholar artist and associate professor of theatre/drama education at the University of Manitoba. His research interests include research-based theatre methodology and performed research, narrative in mathematics education, and theatre/drama in health and teacher education research. His latest book, co-edited with George Belliveau, Contact!Unload: Veterans, Trauma, and Research-based theatre (UBC Press, 2020) explores a project with military veterans, artists, and counselors. He was lead playwright of the play Contact!Unload which has been shared with a variety of audiences across Canada, UK, and Australia. He also co-edited with George Belliveau Research-based Theatre: An Artistic Methodology (Intellect, 2016) which explores a variety of international projects that use theatre to examine social issues. He has been involved in theatre for more than thirty years, working variously as a playwright, stage manager, director, actor, musician, and technician.

Project

During my stay at Faber-Olot, I will be participating in the Research-based Theatre, Pedagogy, Diversity collective residency. I will be working with the collective to explore considerations for continuing to develop Research-based Theatre as a diverse and inclusive methodology with a strong pedagogic focus. I will also be adapting my dissertation play Homa Bay Memories for a full theatrical production. The piece explores my mother’s experiences teaching in Kenya in the 1960s, my experiences as a student teacher there forty years later, and how narrative can allow us to cross borders of time, place, and mortality.