Notes to Belonging: An Adaptation

Amaka Umeh is an award-winning performing artist of Igbo & Ikwerre (Nigerian) descent with a shameless love of puns and a super sweet tooth. While exploring the potential for transformative truth through imagination, and wrestling with the limitations of the English language as a vehicle for understanding, their work centers on reviving forgotten narratives and unearthing suppressed voices. Selected credits: Three Sisters (Obsidian/Soulpepper); Hamlet, Death and the King’s Horseman (Stratford Festival); Sizwe Banzi is Dead (Soulpepper); Fall On Your Knees (Canadian premiere tour); The Wolves (Howland/Crow’s). Film: The Strangers’ Case (CBC Gem). Audiobook: Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi (ECW Press). Training: Birmingham Conservatory for Classical Theatre; Factory Theatre Mechanicals; Randolph College. Awards: Dora Mavor Moore Awards (2024, 2023, 2019); Stratford Festival Peter Donaldson Award (2023); BBPA Harry Jerome President’s Award (2022).

Courtnay McFarlane is a Jamaican-born and Toronto-based visual artist, curator and poet whose literary work has been published in African-Canadian and Queer anthologies. A long-time activist in Toronto’s Black LGBTQ communities, he was a founding member of a number of groups that were forerunners in providing voice and visibility to Black LGBTQ issues.

In 2018 he created Legacies in Motion: Black Queer Archival Projects and curated its first exhibition See We Yah! in April 2019. The exhibition unearthed and celebrated the political and cultural activism of Black LGBTQ communities in Toronto. See We Yah! was exhibited at BAND Gallery as part of Myseum’s Intersections Festival and later remounted at the ArQuives. Subsequent curatorial projects have included: Joints + Junctions: PRESENTing Hogan’s Alley featuring work by Andrea Fatona, Cornelia Wyngaarden and Rose Ann Bailey; Bigger Than We 2, an intergenerational Black Queer and Trans community art event; Honam: An Akan Word for Body focusing on the exploration of the Black male body through the lens of Ghanian-born and Toronto-based queer emerging artist Kwasi Kyei as part of 2022’s CONTACT Photography Festival. His own art work was exhibited later that year in the group show Indexing Resistance: The Blood and Guts of Queer Protest in Canada at the Plumb Gallery.

He was selected for the 2023 – 2024 Black Arts Fellowship (BAF), an interdisciplinary program for eight emerging and mid-career Black artists, at Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism in Toronto. He curated selected work from See Me Yah! an ongoing digital archive project in collaboration with Myseum for the BAF 2023 – 2024 cohort’s culminating group exhibition Love is the Antidote at Wildseed Centre. His recent writing has included contributions to:  Welcome to Blackhurst An Iconic Toronto Neighbourhood, featuring his profile of writer and activist Makeda Silvera, and a personal essay in the Transformative Vision: Studio Portraits of Black Women in Leadership.

In his other life, Courtnay works in the community health sector where he is currently Director of Health Promotion and Community Services at Regent Park Community Health Centre.

Jaye Austin Williams is a critically acclaimed director, playwright and actor. She is also a scholar who specializes in the analysis of drama, cinema and performance theories through critical Black study. Her work focuses on the structural and global implications of antiblackness, and how their myriad, violent performances – both subtle and overt – emanate from the collective unconscious within global modernity.

Her dramatic adaptations create a torsion between the gazing audience’s desire for redemption of blackness into the universal, and the confrontation with redemption’s foreclosure by the collective unconscious (and increasingly, consciously articulated interests) and its violent bearing upon black existence, regardless of economic class, cultural identity, etc.). Dr. Williams is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. She will join the faculty in the new Dept. of Black Study at the University of California, Riverside in Fall 2025.

Patrick Teed is an emerging artist and academic currently finishing his PhD at York University in the Social and Political Thought program. He has performed on stages both locally, provincially, and internationally for decades in a wide variety of forms including theatre (musical, dance, classical, contemporary, devised), opera, cabaret, and choral work. Despite the differences in form, his father will note that Patrick frequently performs as characters who perish…He doesn’t yet know what this means. While his primary interest remains in performing, his most recent work has been focused on developing his co-founded theatre company Afterlife Theatre with Carly Billings, which has found him directing, playwriting, and doing something adjacent to producing.