Dr. Kirsty Johnston is a theatre and performance studies Professor in the UBC Department of Theatre and Film (BA, Queen’s University; MA and PhD, University of Toronto). She has received the Killam Teaching Prize (2012) and the Dean of Arts Faculty Research Award (2014). Her research explores Canadian theatre, modern drama and intersections between performance, disability, and health. Her first book, Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2012) won the Best Book in Canadian Studies award from the Canadian Studies Network and was a finalist for the Canada Prize (Humanities) awarded by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Her further publications include Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism (Bloomsbury: 2016). She has edited special journal issues and sat on editorial boards. She has been PI and Co-PI for several SSHRC research grants. In 2019, she co-hosted the Canadian Association of Theatre Research conference at UBC with colleagues and alumnae Dr. Kelsey Blair and Dr. Julia Henderson. She has served on many departmental, faculty and university committees, including the Dean’s Advisory Committee on Promotion and Tenure and the President’s Working Committee on Disability Culture, Art, and Equity. She is grateful for the many years in which she has been an uninvited guest living and learning on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam people. She looks forward to working with colleagues and students to align the department’s activities with the goals and actions of UBC’s Indigenous Strategic Plan.