About

mia susan amir (she/her/hers) was born in Israel/Occupied Palestine. She is a queer, Crip and Mad Jew of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic ascent who lives and works as an uninvited settler on the unceded and occupied territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, otherwise known as, Vancouver, BC.

mia works at the intersection of creative and community practice as an educator, cultural organizer, writer, director, dramaturg, and theatre artist creating immersive, interdisciplinary works. Much of her practice centres around explorations of the ways in which sociopolitical events are manifest in the space of the individual and collective body, and the body of the land, resulting in narrative hauntings, which she calls Dybbuk Consciousness. mia is interested in how live performance offers a prefigurative space to respond to the conditions currently shaping our world, to challenge and expand perception, to unearth relationship, and to engage in democratic narrative production, starting from the site of physical sensation.

mia has been involved in the creation of works for the stage, and works for unconventional performance settings: parks, sidewalks, beaches, parking lots. In her work she draws from her training in somatics, creative writing, performance art, autoethnography, ancestral embodiment, and site-responsive design. mia sees materials, space, and place as collaborators. Her practice, hybrid in form, engages juxtaposition as a critical strategy to bring breath to the unnamed, or ineffable.

As the 2007/8 Artist in Residence with Neworld Theatre, mia wrote her first full length work, The Map to Zochrot. Select recent works include, Geologic Formations (rEvolver, FestivALT); Obscura Lucida: The Land of My Body, co-created with T’uy’tanat-Cease Wyss (Vines Arts Festival Commission); Across the Salty Waters (Feminist Art Conference); Transmissions: Bodies/Echoes/Ash (Grin City Collective, Allied Media Conference). mia’s creative work has been developed with the support of the Banff Playwrights Lab, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Feminist Art Conference, the Grin City Collective, Urban Ink Productions, and the City of Vancouver Office of Cultural Affairs.

Recent credits include her work as a dramaturg on: Lame Is… (Sick + Twisted Theatre), Wyspa (The Only Animal), and Umizoko (The Only Animal); in addition to her work as dramaturg and director on Burqa Boutique (Virago Play Series), Setting Bones, (PTC/Kalik), and Saving Mother (Vines Arts Festival Commission, The Only Animal).

mia’s writing/thinking has appeared on HowlRound, SpiderWebShow, Lemon Hound, Digging Through the Fat, and in Sustenance: An Anthology of Writers from B.C. and Beyond on the Subject of Food, Anvil Press. A featured poet of the 2018 Art Song Lab, she collaborated with composer Patrick McGraw on the creation of, City.

mia is the recipient of a 2018 LMDA Bly Creative Fellowship for her new project, Unsettling Dramaturgy: Crip and Indigenous Process Design in the Studio, on the Stage, and in the Street an online research colloquium bringing together Crip (mad, d/Deaf, sick and disabled) and Indigenous dramaturgs and theatre makers from across the Americas, for a year of collaborative programming to explore the unique intersections between their lives and practices. As the the Dramaturgy Research Associate at PTC, and with the support of the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, mia is also currently researching best practices in approaches to disability arts in professional theatre and dance across so-called Canada.

mia holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Mills College, traditional Ohlone Territory, Oakland, CA. She is the Creative Director of The Story We Be, the Artist-in-Residence with Fight With a Stick, a member of LMDA and IFTR, and the Board Chair of All Bodies Dance.