Vishesh Abeyratne is a Sri Lankan-Canadian playwright and dramaturg who divides his time between Ottawa and Montreal. He is the Literary Manager for Teesri Duniya Theatre and the coordinator at the Fireworks Playwrights’ Mentorship Program. He has served as playwright-in-residence at the Great Canadian Theatre Company. His plays include Exposure, Blood Offering, White Lion, Brown Tiger, and The Agony Market.
Jen Cressey (BFA Theatre, MA Individualized Program, Concordia University) is a theatre artist and practice-based researcher living in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal. She directs, dramaturges, devises, and co-creates contemporary performances.
Recent credits as a director/dramaturg/ collaborator include The Streets; a segment of the roving site-specific play, Dwellings (Concordia University); the little life of we (Nuit Blanche), Keeper (Art Matters, Freestanding Room), and The Yellow Wallpaper (Concordia). As a performer/ collaborator, Jen participated in ineradicable voices: narratives towards rerooting, headphone verbatim performance.
As a director/ dramaturg, she is currently workshopping the stage play Freedom Junkie (Working Title). Jen has trained in several approaches to generating embodied theatrical work, including Viewpoints, Somatics, Grotowki, and corporeal mime; she is interested in how these practices attune attention and perception, feeding the creative process.