Brooke Leifso (she/they)
Brooke Leifso is a Disabled/Crip performance producer, Expressive Art Practitioner, access consultant, and academic. She has worked in a producing/administrative capacity with: Edmonton Fringe Theatre, Theatre Yes, Ground Zero Productions, Workshop West Playwrights Theatre, Azimuth Theatre, CRIPSiE, Jumblies Theatre (Toronto). She has also performed with mindhive collective (Dwelling, Held, A Wake, s/kin), Edmonton Actors Theatre (Faerie Queen, Burning Bluebeard), Moon At Midnight (ensemble member, Dance Prairie Circuit).
As an Expressive Art Practitioner (MA, EXA-CT, European Graduate School, 2019), she uses a multi-disciplinary approach to facilitate therapeutic Community Art programming—how can art build social healing and cohesion? She is the Justice Artistic Director at Robertson-Wesley United Church through the Spirited Arts Program, a secular outreach initiative creating opportunities to build community around Social Justice topics such as burnout, gender-based violence, Queer politics, conflict theories, and reconciliation. She has also worked in this capacity with high-risk youth, the disability community, and the theatre community. She consults cultural centres and festivals (Edmonton Poetry Festival, Citadel Theatre, CKUA, Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival, SkirtsAFire) on accessibility measures to make performances for all and art as the public good. In 2024, she is the Research Chair at NorQuest College in workplace inclusion and accessibility, a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude and Art Quarter Budapest creating an Arts-based research performance on disabled contemporary dance and audio description (creating equitable meaning), and the artist’s relationship to income.