Our coMmunIty

Simon Rossiter is a lighting designer who occasionally designs scenery.

Designing primarily for dance, he has collaborated on more than 275 works, which have garnered three Dora Mavor Moore awards from nine nominations.

Simon is also the Business Agent for the Associated Designers of Canada, IATSE Local ADC659.

Leelee Oluwatoyosi Eko Davis’ practice is rooted in the foundations of contemporary dance and intermedia creation methodologies.

As a disabled, transgenderqueer artist of Nigerian/French/Algonquin descent, working in decolonial frameworks is central to their research and creations.

Eko Davis also works as a program designer, facilitator, and consultant in the field of Social Innovation and Adaptive Change and is a Co-Artistic Director at the Toronto Dance Community Love-In.

Victoria Mata is a Toronto-based Canadian-Venezuelan dance artist, choreographer, director, and activist. In each of these, she combines an evolving feminism with her passion for expressive arts therapy.

Nivi Samudrala is an early-career Bharatanatyam dancer, educator, and innovator whose work bridges classical Indian dance, science and technology, and improvisational theater.

With a PhD in physical sciences from Yale, Nivi has designed and taught courses such as Physics of Music and Materials Science of Art, uncovering rich connections between science and art.

Sky Fairchild-Waller is an American-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. His work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Die Schweizerische Post, and exhibited in Assisi, Beijing, Boston, Brooklyn, Cairo, Calgary, Cologne, Montréal, New Delhi, São Paulo, Toronto, Turin, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Zürich.

Dedra McDermott (BFA, MA, MFA) has charted a robust cross-disciplinary path encompassing live performance and visual culture.

She is a Jamaican, first-generation Canadian contemporary dancer (Film/TV/Stage), researcher, emerging curator, producer, and movement dramaturg. In all facets of her evolving creative practice, Dedra is dedicated to supporting artists exploring Latin American and Caribbean stories.

Recent work: Cartographies of Presence: Live at Mercer Union: a centre for contemporary art (2024) and her previous role as Co-Executive Artistic Producer of DanceWorks (2023 – 2025).

Jose Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban is a dance/movement artist, educator, and a PhD candidate in social justice education at the University of Toronto. Miggy’s research and teaching explores critical and creative pedagogies oriented through disability/mad arts and culture, black radical traditions, and dance/performance. Miggy’s current choreographic work explores improvisational practices of navigating mad and queer routes to embody Filipinx (un)rest.