Bio

Christina Cook is a Ph.D. student in Counselling Psychology at the University of British Columbia. She is also a registered clinical counsellor and a playwright, and her work explores mental health through inquiry and art. Her play Quick Bright Things was a finalist for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for drama. As a therapist, Christina specializes in working youth and adults who are members of LGBTQ2S+ communities. Christina draws on her background as a professional actor and theatre artist to bring drama-based approaches to research and therapy settings. Christina currently serves as the director of research projects for the Research-based Theatre Lab.

Project

The 2023 March residency at Faber will allow me to collaborate with international scholars and artists to refine my understandings of research-based theatre, a methodological framework that casts theatre and research and creates spaces for inquiry and knowledge sharing that are dynamic, flexible, and accessible. I will draw on these collaborative explorations to inform my current research-based theatre project, an autoethnodramatic research exploring graduate student experiences in psychology as a trans woman. This research, for which I will transform auto-narratives into a playscript, will form part of doctoral research dissertation.