Meet The Directors
Dr. Kelsey Jacobson
Director
Dr. Kelsey Jacobson is an Assistant Professor in the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University where she teaches theatre history, theory, literature, and directing. She is also a co-founder and director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (CSAR), an organization focused on furthering the field of audience studies in theatre and performance, and a co-editor of the Routledge Theatre & Performance Series in Audience Research with Dr. Kirsty Sedgman. Following her MA (University of London, 2014) and PhD (University of Toronto, 2018) she completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto and also taught in the Bachelor of Education program at Niagara University. She is passionate about teaching, especially working with young people, and was awarded the Frank Knox Award for Teaching Excellence in 2021.
Her research focuses on audience and spectatorship studies, and in particular on the ways in which audiences impact, receive, and make meaning through performance. She was awarded funding from SSHRC to study copresence in a project called Being Together (2021-2024) and is also currently involved in a SSHRC grant on performance and oral histories of performance called Gatherings (2019-2032) and a project related to pandemic responses to the live performing arts across the G7 countries funded by the British Academy (2023-2024). She has shared her work at CATR, ASTR, ATHE, IFTR, MATC, TAPRA and in AllStages Magazine, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Performance Matters, Theatre Research in Canada, Research in Drama Education, Contemporary Theatre Review, the Journal of Consent-Based Performance, and Canadian Theatre Review. To date, Kelsey has published one co-edited collection, Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope: Enacting Community-Engaged Research Through Performative Research (Springer, 2020) and one monograph, Real-ish: Audiences, Feeling, and the Production of Realness in Contemporary Performance (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2023). Additional research interests include: affect theory, applied theatre, qualitative methodologies, and equity and access in audiences.
Dr. Signy Lynch
Director
Signy Lynch is a theatre scholar, critical dramaturg, and educator. Her research interests include contemporary intercultural, diasporic, and Black theatres in Canada, spectatorship and audience research, and theatre criticism. Her peer-reviewed and public-facing articles appear in publications including Theatre Research in Canada, Contemporary Theatre Review, Canadian Theatre Review, and New Theatre Quarterly, alt.theatre, Cdn Times, and Intermission Magazine. She is co-editor of Canadian Theatre Review volume 186, “Theatre After the Explosion” (Spring 2021). She is currently developing a book manuscript 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 Governor General’s Gold Academic Medal (2022) She has taught courses at York University, Toronto Metropolitan University, and the University of Toronto. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga and is cross-appointed to the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies graduate program.
Co - Founders
Dr. Kelsey Jacobson
Dr. Jenny Salisbury
Dr. Scott Mealey
Cassandra Silver
Dr. Scott Mealey
Director
Dr. Scott Mealey is a researcher, consultant, and educator whose work spans theatre criticism, drama and religious education, prototype theory, community activism, and audience studies. Through quantitative, qualitative, and ethnographic observation he especially considers how audiences make sense of performance events and are changed by them. His work has appeared in Performance Matters, Research in Drama Education, Contemporary Theatre Review, Journal of Drama Theory and Criticism, Theatre Research in Canada, and multiple edited collections. He has led and supported mixed method empirical research and evaluation at University of Toronto, University of Windsor, Brock University, and University of British Columbia and with arts organizations that included Outside the March, Nightwood Theatre, Volcano Theatre, and Mixed Company Theatre. From 2020-2022 he served as a co-investigator on the SSHRC funded online theatre study The Stream You Step In: Creating a Communal Theatre Experience in the Time of COVID where he oversaw and trained a team evaluating digital audience experience. In addition, Scott has spent more than two decades teaching practical and theoretical courses to post-secondary students and is a permanent sessional lecturer at University of Toronto Scarborough. In 2023, Scott was appointed as the associate director of the Canadian Institute for Empirical Church Research (Wycliffe College, University of Toronto), where he has helped developed a thirty-year consolidation of the Canadian Revenue Agency’s national charity data and the Canadian Census of Population.
Dr. Kelsey Blair
Director
Kelsey Blair is a theatre, performance, and cultural studies scholar. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University in Montreal where she teaches courses on the topics of professional writing, creative writing, digital culture, and video games. Her research focuses on multiple interconnected areas: performance studies; sport and performance; Broadway musical theatre; affect theory; spectacle performance, and theatre audiences. She publishes articles and chapters across these areas, and her book, Sport and Performance in the Twenty-First Century, was published by Routledge in 2022. She is also a young adult fiction author and a director on multiple not-for-profit Boards.
Dr. Jenny Salisbury
Director
Jenny Salisbury completed her PhD at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto in 2020. Her teaching and research focus is Community-Engaged Theatre, Documentary and Applied Theatre, with an emphasis on Canadian play creation and audiences. She is also a founding member and associate director of The Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research. Jenny’s professional work involves directing and dramaturgy, project-based arts management, play development, producing and community engagement, especially for Common Boots Theatre (formerly Theatre Columbus). She is a sessional teacher and the program coordinator for Ask & Imagine, a leadership and education program at Huron University College, Western University. Growing up all over Canada as part of a military family, Jenny is now a Toronto-based theatre artist and educator, with strong ties to Ottawa, St. John’s, Vancouver, Halifax, and London, England. Jenny holds an MA in Text and Performance from RADA and King’s College, London, and is a graduate of the joint acting program at Sheridan College and the University of Toronto.