Affinity Groups

Setayesh Babaei is an Iranian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Toronto. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design from OCAD University. Setayesh will share how she has set up her home to function as both a studio and a caregiving space, noting the challenges and barriers she’s currently navigating, and how she’s exploring these challenges through the genre of the horror film.

Babaei’s practice investigates the often-unseen systems that sustain life. During her undergraduate studies, she explored Toronto’s buried waterways through Veins, examining the city’s hidden infrastructures. Following the birth of her first child in 2021, her inquiry shifted from ecological systems to maternal ones, considering motherhood as another life-sustaining infrastructure carried through bodies, relationships, and everyday acts of care.

Working across sculpture, installation, photography, performance, sound, and participatory practices, Babaei explores the embodied and material dimensions of motherhood, caregiving, and intergenerational memory. Grounded in material experimentation and feminist, autoethnographic methodologies, her work reveals the quiet gestures and invisible labour of care, inviting audiences to reconsider what societies choose to value.

Rimah Jabr is a theatre director, playwright, screenwriter, and PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. She is currently a resident artist with Necessary Angel Theatre Company in Toronto, where she is developing her new play, The Apartment. Rimah will share how she navigates her caregiving role while working across multiple artistic disciplines, and how she has learned to create efficient systems to manage her artistic projects and home life.

Rimah holds a master’s degree in theatre-making from RITCS in Brussels and has written and directed plays presented in Belgium, Canada, and Palestine, including This Is Not What I Want to Tell You (2024), Broken Shapes (2022), Raya (2018), High Heels & Stuffed Zucchini (2015), and Two Ladybugs (2013). Her practice often brings theatre into dialogue with visual art, creating performances that blur disciplinary boundaries. Her doctoral research is a performance-ethnography project with Palestinian designers from Hebron, examining how confinement shapes creative processes in set design. Her practice has also expanded into film, with two short films, De-Clutter (2024) and You’ve Seen It on TV (2025–26).

Sasha Singer-Wilson (she/her) is a Tkaronto based multidisciplinary artist, facilitator, and researcher of Lithuanian, Italian, Irish and British ancestry. With a BFA in Acting from York and an MFA in Theatre and Creative Writing from UBC, she has made performances in bathrooms, basements, schools, theatres, lofts, and online. As a research-creation PhD student in Theatre & Performance Studies at York, Sasha’s ethnographic research explores climate emotions, parenting, and families as sites of activist intervention; as well as care, relationality and decolonization in scholarship, creation and performance. She teaches voice and speech at The Centre for Indigenous Theatre and York, and has facilitated workshops in theatre-making, creative writing, and voice across Turtle Island.

Previous Affinity Group/s: Caregiving Amidst Polycrisis

Read more about Sasha at sashasingerwilson.com

Jess Dobkin is a performance artist, curator, teacher, and activist whose work has been presented internationally in theatres, galleries, art fairs, festivals, museums, and public spaces. She has been described as an “internationally acclaimed queer performance artist” and her interdisciplinary career spans more than 30 years. Her work explores the dynamic relationship between live performance, documentation, and the archive, engaging with sensory experience, embodiment, affect, and collaborative care.

Jess will share how her artistic career and parenting journey have been intertwined through the lens of queer parenting and queer culture.

Sodienye Waboso Amajor is a Dora-Nominated Nigerian Actor, Writer, Performer and Mother who lives and works in Ontario. Dienye holds an MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from York University with a keen interest in Pre-Colonial African Theory, Performance and Development. Dienye is a published writer whose work can be found on the online publication She Does the City. In 2022, she developed and debuted a new visual and photographic work titled “Rest” which seeks to prioritize and localize the exploration and imagery of Black bodies in a state of Rest. Dienye is currently continuing her studies as a PhD student in Theatre, Dance, & Performance Studies at York University. She currently works with Suitcase in Point Multi-Arts Company as the Associate Artistic Director.

Sarah Cullen is a visual artist who headed down the path of walking as a method for artwork, research, and alternative approaches to landscape. After the birth of her first child, she came to a fork in the road and took the diversion that eventually led to the creation of MOTHRA: Artist-Parent Project, which came to be in 2018 in Toronto. This diversion has since made its way back to the original path with many other forays along the way.

MOTHRA started as a grassroots project which has grown because of high interest and demand. MOTHRA is interested in institutional critique, among other things, and has specifically focused on the artist residency as a site to welcome and admit to the important social relationships in our lives. MOTHRA currently runs out of Gibraltar Point Centre for the Arts on Toronto Island.

Diana Tso 曹楓 is a theatre artist, playwright, storyteller and Dora award-winning actor. She’s a theatre faculty member at George Brown College. She graduated from the University of Toronto in English Literature and of Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in France. She’s worked with diverse theatres internationally for over 25 years. Recent performances include: Modern Times Stage Company’s The Cherry Orchard, Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s Les Misérables and at the 2017 Stratford Festival in Bakkhai and The Komagata Maru Incident. Upcoming: Theatre Smith Gilmour’s ensemble of Pu Songling’s stories at Crow’s Theatre 2025/2026 season.

As artistic director of Red Snow Collective, which creates compelling theatre drawn from eastern and western storytelling aesthetics, her productions focus on empowering the voices of women: www.redsnowcollective.ca

Her plays, Red Snow (2012) and Comfort (2016) bring to light the resilience of women in war and her Monkey Queen stories re-imagine of mythologies from the female perspective. Her new play, Carried by the River, inspired by the daughters of China’s one child policy, premiered March 2025 at Tarragon Theatre.

Hurmat Ul Ain is a Pakistani-Canadian interdisciplinary artist and art educationist. Currently she is pursuing her PhD at the Program of Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies in York University, Toronto. She is currently splitting her time between Toronto and Freetown, Sierra Leone.

She has a Masters from School of The Art Institute Chicago, where she was studying as a Fulbright Scholar. Her individual and collaborative practice resides in the space between “performative-gestures” and “object-making”, and deals with unpacking personal experiences, cultural memories, and collective behaviors.

Ain is a research fellow at the Hemispheric Encounters since 2022, researching through Oralities Cluster on foodways and performance cultures in the Americas. She has published on intersection of food and art in Performance Research Journal (2017) and presented on everyday practices and performance art from Pakistan at various platforms, including the College Arts Association, New York (2021).

Janïsa sings, writes and produces for stage, recording and film. A consummate performer, Janisa’s versatility and talent have informed her career’s expansion from singer to actor to producer.

She narrated, composed and underscored music for Ravi Jain’s award-winning staging of Salt-Water Moon in Mirvish Productions. Janïsa’s feature film debut was This Place (Mutuals Production COMPANY, 2022) which premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival. Currently residing in Toronto, Janïsa has showcased all over Canada at Festivals like NXNE, Canadian Music Week, Vancouver Island Music Fest, Manifesto Festival, Sofar Toronto shows, Private Corporate events and more.

Janïsa’s journey led her to establish the Mother Artist Society to gather, connect, support and advocate for mothers and their art; this was based on her own experiences with the particular kind of marginalization faced by creative women.

While born in Calgary, Tiffany Shaw was raised in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) within Treaty 6 Territory and District 9: Fort Edmonton Métis District. Tiffany’s Métis lineage derives from Fort McMurray via the Red River and is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta. Tiffany is interdisciplinary in her practice as a Métis Architect and Indigenous Practice Leader with Reimagine Architects, Principal of Reimagine Gathering, an Indigenous consulting company, as well as an artist, independent curator, and a founding core member of Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective. Tiffany believes in the power of listening to the land and the perseverance of Indigenous women’s work. She seeks to engage methods of motherhood and caregiving into workplace and artistic practices. Forming a cohesive narrative between past, present, and future concepts, Tiffany brings essential relational and reciprocal aspects into contemporary practice that reflect the hearts and minds of the groups she collaborates with.

Roula Said is a singer, dancer, musician, actor and poet of Palestinian heritage based in Toronto, Canada. Roula has been studying, teaching and performing Arab music and dance for over 30 years. From within her tradition as practiced here in the west (where she has also explored many other styles of movement, music, voice and dance), Roula has created Seven Waves Movement and Embodied Voice, original and innovative methodologies rooted in the Arab Arts and open to the world. She is also a member of Wild Soma Collective, along with Andrea Nann, Shannon Litzenberger and Julia Aplin, exploring embodiment as a world-making practice and an architecture connecting us to ourselves, each other and all of life. Deeply interested in ceremony and meaningful transitions, Roula also works as a wedding officiant and a death doula, supporting and empowering individuals and families to expand into areas of greater choice, agency and even beauty when it comes to death care.