Photo by Paul Joseph / UBC Brand & Marketing
UBC Theatre and Film is proud to recognize our Class of Fall 2025 graduates. They have grown into remarkable artists, practitioners and scholars, and into even more inspiring members of our greater Theatre and Film community. We are thrilled to celebrate their achievements today, and we cannot wait to see what they do next!
Message from Dr. Kirsty Johnston, Head of the Department of Theatre and Film
To the multi-talented, creative, and inspiring class of Fall 2025 Department of Theatre Film graduates:
Congratulations on your achievement!
Graduation is a significant threshold of change in your lives. At this moment of transition, it is important to celebrate the many challenges overcome, ideas learned and generated, skills gained, talents refined, and friendships made. None of this has been easy, but then nothing worthwhile ever is.
Many of you will have commenced your studies during the unprecedented learning conditions of the global pandemic. You demonstrated resilience and creativity in keeping the spark of artistic inquiry, scholarship and performance alive during this challenging time. You also learned new ways of working, communicating and analyzing in a rapidly changing world. That capacity to shift and be flexible when facing challenges will be a tremendous asset in the years to come; so too will be the knowledge that you have acquired alongside your well-honed capacity to acquire and share knowledge. You have become ever better at learning how to learn. You have not done so alone, but through partnership with your colleagues, in discussion with professors and instructors, and, critically, through the power of theatre, film and performance. Our scholarly and artistic disciplines are collaborative, and in your future lives, we hope that you will lead many new and innovative collaborations in the Arts and beyond. Your perspectives, wisdom and talents have never been more needed.
As you step into this next chapter, please remember that our relationship doesn’t end here. You are joining a talented and highly successful group of people—UBC Theatre and Film alumni whose regular connection and involvement with the department is vital for our collective success. We are proud of our graduates and hope to showcase your achievements now and in the future. So please stay in touch, lend us a hand, and set forth to remake the Arts and the broader world for the better. We can’t wait to see what you will accomplish next!
Sending our warmest congratulations to you and those who love and support you,
Dr. Kirsty Johnston
Undergraduate
Annika Chan (She/Her)
Annika is proud to graduate from UBC with a BA in Theatre. Her experiences in the Arts One Program, the Department of Theatre and Film, and the AMS Artelier Club deeply shaped her artistic journey, allowing her to grow through mentorship, creative collaboration, and hands-on production work. She now works at Kello Inclusive as an acting coach and administrator, exclusively representing disabled and visibly different talent, and she continues to pursue performance with Orange Model Management Inc. Annika extends heartfelt thanks to her professors, teaching staff, friends, family, and to those who supported her through the Creative Launchpad Scholarship and the Kensaku Asano Memorial Award.
Graduate
Kayla McIntyre (They/She)
Kayla McIntyre (they/she) is a PhD student at UBC in the department of Theatre and Film. Kayla’s work explores queerness and (dis)ability in game-based performances. Kayla recently completed their MA at UBC which examined how members of the queer community have used table-top-role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons to explore gender and sexual identity. Kayla is additionally an active theatre practitioner where their creative work focuses on directing and playwriting. Their most current work is titled The Hands of Fate (2025) which was shown in March at Granville Island's, The Nest and at Ignite Youth Festival in May 2025.
Mikayla Kwan (She/Her)
Mikayla Kwan is a multidisciplinary artist and academic with an undergraduate degree in music theatre performance from Sheridan College, and now a Master's degree in Theatre Studies from UBC. Kwan's identity as a second generation Chinese-Canadian, and emerging performing artist, has led her to ask questions and advocate for Asian representation in media and in musical theatre specifically. These questions and ideas have come to create Kwan's MA thesis entitled “I Enjoy Being a (Asian North American) Girl”: The Evolution of Asianness in North American Musical Theatre. Kwan aims to position her work as a vehicle that can impact both musical theatre creation and education.
Jasmine Sanau (She/Her)
Jasmine Sanau is a Masters graduate from the Cinema and Media studies program and receipt of the Cordula and Gunter Paetzold Fellowship. She frequently works through a methodology of materiality in anti-colonial and anti-Anthropogenic ways of thinking, most recently through the beach as a site of liminal resistance through water, rocks, and sand. During her free time, Jasmine likes to crochet, try out new recipes, and play RPGs.
Yuning Liu (She/Her)
Yu-ning Liu’s doctoral research in Theatre Studies charts a journey of xiqu (traditional Chinese theatre) across the Taiwan Strait in her dissertation, “Accidental Encounters: A Journey of Developing the Subjectivity of Taiwan’s Contemporary Xiqu Forms,” tracing how xiqu were transplanted from China to Taiwan and remade through local histories of migration, martial law, and democratization, showing how xiqu becomes a dynamic Sinophone performance practice rather than a fixed emblem of “Chineseness.” Her research bridges archival work, ethnography, performance analysis, and practice-based inquiry, and her publications have appeared in various issues of Asian Theatre Journal and others.
While our congratulatory message extends to all of our 2025 graduates, this post only includes the profiles of students who have opted-in to be featured.
