Julia Gray
Need a short bio? Here you go:
Julia Gray, PhD, is a scholar, researcher, writer, and artist. With over 20 years of experience under her belt, her award-winning research, writing and arts projects have reached a wide range of industry and academic audiences. She has a career-long commitment to equity, diversity and belonging.
Longer bio (conference organizers, you can copy and paste this):
Julia Gray, PhD, is an award-winning scholar, writer, and artist. She is currently an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Health and Society at University of Toronto Scarborough. She has worked across sectors for over 20 years, including arts and culture, healthcare and higher education, and has published many articles in peer-reviewed, professional and social media forums. She has created several multi-dimensional arts projects, drawing on theatre, film, animation, and other art forms and technologies. She also produced an edited collection called ‘ReView: An Anthology of Plays Committed to Social Justice‘ (Brill-Sense Publishers, 2017, editor). She has a career-long commitment to equity, diversity and belonging.
Full bio:
Julia Gray is an award-winning scholar, writer and artist. She is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Health and Society at University of Toronto Scarborough, an Academic Fellow at the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research, University of Toronto, and was a 2020-21 Visiting Scholar at Sensorium, a research centre embedded in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University. She was a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow at Bloorview Research Institute, at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto, Canada. Her work is interdisciplinary and intersectional, drawing on theatre, dance and performance studies, critical disability and age studies, queer and feminist phenomenology and aesthetic philosophy. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Arts from York University’s Department of Theatre, and attained my PhD from Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at University of Toronto, which was supported by a CIHR‐STIHR Doctoral Fellowship in Health Care, Technology, and Place.
She has worked in professional theatre for 20 years in a number of capacities, including artistic work, administration, education and production – this includes companies such as Canadian Stage Company, Young People’s Theatre, Mirvish Productions, Tarragon Theatre, The Charlottetown Festival, and many Toronto-based independent theatre companies. Since 2005, with the development of After the Crash: a play about brain injury which was commissioned by Toronto Rehab and University of Toronto, she has been working with health researchers, community members and clinical practitioners integrating the arts in disability, aging and health research and practice.
She has published many articles in peer-reviewed, professional and social media forums, in addition to six peer-reviewed book chapters. She also produced an edited collection aimed at providing creative spaces for imagining difference called ‘ReView: An Anthology of Plays Committed to Social Justice‘ (Brill-Sense Publishers, 2017, editor). She has published and presented across disciplines, including theatre and performance studies, age studies, disability studies, literature, education, social science, rehabilitation science, public health, recreation and leisure studies, and nursing.
She has created many research-informed theatre projects in the area of disability, aging and health . Most notably, she is the primary playwright for the collectively created After the Crash: a play about brain injury (Ruckus Ensemble / Toronto Rehabilitation Institute) and co-wrote the play Seeing the Forest (York University), a play about patient safety culture, with Dr. Gail Mitchell. Her most recent project, co-produced by Partnerships in Dementia Care Alliance at University of Waterloo, is called Cracked: new light on dementia, and challenges how dementia is understood as irrevocably tragic. Cracked was filmed in 2017, and is available for download at http://www.crackedondementia.ca
photo credit: Lisa MacIntosh
Julia Gray 