We are a project of Culture/Nature/Structure,
housed in LePARC (Performing Arts Research Cluster)
at the Milieux Institute at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
We are funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant.
We’re drawing upon an international community of performance artists, scholars and designers.





Meghan Moe Beitiks
Christine White
Zoe Heffring
Alexia Maldona-Juarez
Milena Pereira
Meghan Moe Beitiks (Artistic Director/Principal Investigator) is an artist working with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. They analyze perceptions of ecology though the lenses of site, history, emotions, and their own body in order to produce work that analyzes relationships with the non-human. They were a Fulbright Student Fellow, a recipient of the Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and an Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. They exhibited her work at the I-Park Environmental Art Biennale, Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery in Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the House of Artists in Moscow, and other locations in California, Chicago, Australia and the UK. They received their BA in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre (of/and/with/Sustainable Performance Design) at Concordia University. www.meghanmoebeitiks.com
Christine White (Graduate Research Assistant) is completing her master’s degree in Art Education at Concordia University in support of her socially engaged art practice. She has received many awards and fellowships for her work with PedalBox Gallery (@galerie_pedalbox) such as the Elspeth McConnell Fine Arts Award in 2021, the Concordia Undergraduate Research Award in 2022 and was a semifinalist in the 2023 provincial wide university competition, Forces Avenir. In the summer of 2023 Christine received both the Peter N. Thomson Family Field School Award and Quebec Mobility Grant to develop her intermedia based practice at the host institution, CCMAS (Mexican Centre for Music and Sound Art) in Morelia, Michoacán where she developed and performed Home Of Birds/Hogar de las avesan, an acousmatic soundscape accompanied by experimental video disintegration.

Zoë Heffring (she/her) (Undergraduate Research Assistant) is in her final year of Scenography at Concordia University. Her work is based in design, music, writing and performance. She is inspired by chance encounters, serendipity, coincidences, conversations, and the palpable, potential energy that exists in everything around us. In 2024 Zoë received the Elspeth McConnell Fine Arts award to work as an assistant designer with the 7 Fingers on their project “Le Géante”. In 2023 she also received the Peter N. Thomson Family Field School Award to attend the Prague Quadrennial in which she contributed to an installation representing Canadian Universities as well as designed a public performance in the space. Beyond her work and studies in the Fine Arts, Zoë has 5 years of experience as a research assistant at McGill University in the Faculty of Law, exploring how through taxation we might find ways to hold major polluters accountable for their impact on communities and the climate.
Alexia Maldonado-Juarez (Undergraduate Research Assistant) is a Mexico-Japanese artist based in Montreal, Tiohtià:ke. She is currently completing a double major in Intermedia: Video, Performance & Electronic Arts and Acting for the Theater in Concordia University. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is based in performance, video arts and painting. Her work is often inspired by her own identity and modern-day social issues. She aspires to, through her love of mixing the unconventional, inspire her own communities. In 2021 she was awarded Best Experimental Film in Dawson’s Arts, Letters and Culture Festival and was nominated again in 2022. She is currently working as a facilitator and a consultant for MBC Production’s Theatre of the Oppressed workshop.


Milena Pereira is a circus and dance artist. Currently, she is a PhD student, through a cotutelle arrangement, in both the Humanities Program at Concordia University and the Performing Arts Program at the University of Campinas, Brazil. Her research explores the understanding and practice of virtuosity in contemporary circus and dramaturgy in the performing arts. She has been involved in creating in various spaces and formats, ranging from the traditional stage to public spaces, rural settlements, and video performances.
Project Alumni
Keith Fernandez (Undergraduate Research Assistant 2023-24) is a multifaceted artist working primarily in theatre creation creation and performance following his graduation from the The Grant MacEwan Theatre Arts Program in 2007. In 2018 he founded Berlin Musicals, a professional musical theatre company providing performance opportunities to young and up-and-coming performers, based in Germany. Keith returned to education to support his directing practice in theatre while also exploring dramaturgy and interdisciplinary performance practices in the Bachelor of Fine Arts Performance Creation program at Concordia University. In his short time in Montreal, Keith has worked as a performer, director, dramaturg, EDI & artistic associate and stage manager at The Segal Centre for the Performing Arts, Imago Theatre, Infinitheatre and Montreal Arts Interculturels. Channeling his drag persona KAJOL, he is developing a new piece of interdisciplinary theatre shaped around his nomadic lifestyle and the understanding of his hybrid identity.
Carolie Delisle (she/her) (Undergraduate Research Assistant 2023-24 ) is a Canadian born designer and artist currently residing in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and studying Design for the Theatre and Computation Arts. She returned to her studies after almost a decade of work in IT database management. Through her studies, she aims to combine past experience in systems analysis, technologies and her fiber practices to create new well-rounded interdisciplinary curricula for performance design with a focus on sustainable practices. Her technical skills range from hands on fiber transformation, drafting, 3D modeling, website design and electronics. Her multidisciplinary exploration constantly and restless nature, leads her to redefine her view of the world, practice and relation to art.
Project Contributors
Gabrielle Petrov (Ecosomatics Consultation 2024). For over a decade, Gabi has taught artists independently and at institutions including Concordia, McGill and Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado where she received her MFA in Contemporary Performance. In her practice, she draws on the Viewpoints approach to performance which she studied under Wendell Beavers and Anne Bogart. Other practices she draws from are Contemplative Dance Practice which she studied under Barbara Dilley, and Body-Mind Centering®. With funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Concordia Part-time Faculty Association, Gabi is deepening her somatic practice and will be certified as a Somatic Movement Educator in 2025. She also partners with organizations like Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal and the Quebec Drama Federation to offer somatic training to artists. In her work, Gabi uses improvisation to explore how she and others may experience the transformative spaces between and within performance and everyday life. In 2018, Gabi co-founded the Habitat Practice Group with Prof. Myrna Wyatt Selkirk and Carina Rose. Using tools from various fields including theatre, dance, and architecture, the group is pursuing a long-form investigation of movement and sound as they exist within and surrounding improvisational structures.


Steffie Boucher (she/they) is a black queer visual artist from the Caribbean, located in Montreal. Their main interests revolve around structures, urban and body architectures. The dancing body inspires them, they are seeking to include it in their works, to evoke it. This dancing body calls, just as nature. To discern multiple architectures and geometries in everything, to create new ones based on what exists, is the core of Steffie’s audiovisual research. Trees are obsessively dwelling within the artist; they’re attempting to make them reveal the secret of their obsession by capturing them: a strange thing to realize that most of their life, their body has lived in the city and struggles to stay away from it.
Their heart and soul, to nature.