EMERGING VOICES

Photo of Emerging Voices mentor Masha Bashmakova, 2022.

Artistic Mentorship for Young Writers and Creators

Emerging Voices is our mentorship program that encourages youth to try their hand at playwriting. Through in-class writing workshops, our professional mentors  guide students to begin their own script in a supportive and playful environment, and ensure they are left with tools to continue writing beyond the classroom.

Emerging Voices follows four steps:

  1. In-class playwriting & theatre creation workshops with professional mentors take place between December - April.

  2. Completed plays are submitted to The-Write-Stuff, our youth playwriting competition.

  3. Each play is read by a jury of professional playwrights, and shortlisted scripts receive one-on-one dramaturgical feedback, as well as a staged reading at Park N’ Play, our annual open air reading series.

  4. All finalists work will be proudly promoted on our social media, and the winning script will be awarded a $500 cash prize to encourage further development.

MEET OUR MENTORS

BANAFSHEH HASSANI

Banafsheh Hassani (any/all pronouns) بنفشه حسنی is an Iranian, Montreal-based emerging theatre creator and producer. They're currently in their final year of studies in Performance Creation at Concordia University. Banafsheh's joys in life are her cats, her rats, literature about difficult feelings and wrighting plays that help them understand the world around. Most recent credits include GRIEF directed by Jessica Carmichael, Blood Family (Sometimes Not) and À Confirmer / T.B.C. (Montreal fringe festival 2023) by The Sky is the Limit Theatre. Her work mostly centers home, memory, loss, blood and illness.

MASHA BASHMAKOVA

Masha Bashmakova is a Montreal-based theatre artist from Russia and the UAE, navigating the ways in which creative expression serves as a deep and necessary language in expressing interpersonal and social challenges. A graduate of Concordia’s Performance Creation program, her current practice spans visual and performing arts, with a specific focus in performance, theatre directing, and interdisciplinary creation. Masha’s recent work explores fragmentation in forms of episodic storytelling, diving into the points of encounter between image-based, audio and text-based storytelling languages.

POONAM DHIR

Poonam Dhir (they/she) is a queer playwright, poet, Punjabi descendent, and settler currently based in Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal), on the traditional, unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka people. Poonam’s work explores identity, trauma, memory and the relationship between belief and belonging. They contemplate themes of migration, displacement and loss. They are the recipient of a 2022 Lambda Literary Fellowship in Playwriting and a finalist for the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award, Poetry. Poonam was selected to participate in Nightwood Theatre’s 2022-23 Write From the Hip Program led by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard.

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