Shauna is a Montreal based urban curator with a background in professional theatre practice and interdisciplinary studies. Her curatorial work involves long-term documentary and site-responsive urban research projects. Within the context of urban change, in her curatorial practice she works with artists to create site responsive performances, interventions, installations, and collaborative community engaged projects. In her practice she asks how critical curation can be a mode of intervention in the urban realm, and how urban spaces in transition might be active collaborators, with artists, in the surfacing of significant pasts, sublimated political positions, and forms of cultural agency, including the agencies of the built environment itself. Shauna works with oral history, critical post humanist thought, performance, feminist and queer theory to rethink sites, discourses, and themes such as spatial agency, the public sphere, gender, class, race, gentrification and the right to the city. Her ongoing research addresses the cultural politics of postindustrial urban spaces, and the role of art/ists in creating politically engaged communities in these spaces. She is currently undertaking research on the role of digital and new media in the public sphere in relation to expanded scenographic practices and concepts such as spatial dramaturgy and performative urbanism.
Shauna received her PhD in Humanities (2014), Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, where she has also taught in the Departments of Theatre and Art History. In 2010, she founded Urban Occupations Urbaines, a curatorial platform for artists, communities and the public to creatively and critically engage with cities and urban change. In Montreal, she has collaborated with La Fonderie Darling, Heritage Montréal, Centaur Theatre, Montréal Arts Interculturel, Le Corridor culturel de Griffintown, Parks Canada, and the Centre d’histoire de Montréal. She is a founding member and formerly co-director of Points de vue, a Montreal based community-engaged art, research, and urban activist platform. She has given public lectures and presentations at cultural institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Ephemeral City, 2010), Articule (“Would you be my curator?” 2012), and The McCord Museum (City Talks, 2013). In 2014 she was the associate producer for international bi-annual event Encuentro IX. Shauna is an affiliate member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling Concordia University. Since 2006, she has been a guest instructor at the National Theatre School of Canada.