Dr. Shauna Janssen is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher, curator, performance designer, and educator working and living in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal, on the unceded Indigenous lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Her teaching, research, and creative practice are consonant with performative, site-specific, intersectional, interdisciplinary, socially-engaged and collaborative approaches to performance creation.
At Concordia she is Associate Dean of Academic Programs and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts. She is also Associate Professor of Performance Creation in the Department of Theatre, Creative Director of PULSE, and Director of the Immersive Storytelling Studio housed at Milieux. She is also co-investigator researcher with Hexagram Network. Between 2018 and 2023 she was appointed a Concordia University Research Chair in Performative Urbanism, and from 2018-2020 she was the Director of Concordia’s Institute for Urban Futures.
Her transversal approach to teaching has been shaped by twenty years as an educator and organizer in the field of theatre and twenty years experience working professionally, in the performing and live arts; devising, staging, producing and touring, nationally and internationally new contemporary Canadian works created for theatre, opera, and dance. In Canada, she has worked with companies such as Volcano Theatre, Theatre Columbus, the Tarragon and Factory Theatres, Queen of Puddings, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, among others, as well as toured with theatre projects to the Belfry Theatre, Citadel Theatre, the Manitoba Theatre Centre, and the National Arts Centre.
Current research-creation activities are focused on the dramaturgy and creation of new media performance, and site-responsive mixed reality scenographies that critically engage 3D visualization technologies in queer and feminist productions of space. Her ongoing research and creation activities are focused on performative and curatorial engagements with the spatial politics of urban change, and often takes the form of site-specific urban interventions, feminist, collaborative art and community-engaged projects. .