Dr Lindsay Lachance is an award-winning dramaturge and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia, where she holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Land-Based and Relational Dramaturgies. She earned her PhD in Theatre from UBC, successfully defending her dissertation in 2018: The Embodied Politics of Relational Indigenous Dramaturgies.

Lindsay’s academic and artistic work exists at the intersections of Theatre Theory and Dramaturgy, and Critical Canadian Theatre Studies. As a dramaturge, she collaborates with artists and scholars across the country, supporting new play development with a practice rooted in relationality and land-engaged methodologies. In honouring her Algonquin Anishinaabe family, her dramaturgical approach is informed by relationships with birch bark biting and the Gatineau River.

Dr Lachance played a foundational role in the creation and direction of the Indigenous Theatre department at Canada’s National Arts Centre, where she served as the inaugural Artistic Associate. And as a practicing dramaturge, Lachance workshops dramaturgical techniques and principles she has researched and developed with both emerging and established theatre artists. Recently, these workshops have led to plays being published with Playwrights Canada Press and others having world premieres across the country. Dramaturgy as a relational process is central to her interest in using dramaturgical events and gatherings as specific areas of analysis. Lindsay works with artists and collectives individually to help identify starting points that can be used to build dramaturgical models.

Some recent dramaturgical projects include, Frances Končan’s Medea and Women of the Fur Trade, Yolanda Bonnell’s My Sister’s Rage, Quelemia Sparrow’s Skyborn, and Kim Senklip Harvey’s Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story. Together with playwright Kim Senklip Harvey, they won the 2019 Jessie Richardson award for Significant Artistic Achievement for Decolonizing Theatre Practices and Spaces. This award acknowledged the dramaturgical methods and processes Lachance developed for Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story, which later went on to win the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for Best Drama.

In 2024, Playwrights Canada Press published Staging Coyote’s Dream: Volume III, co-edited by Lindsay Lachance and Monique Mojica. This anthology features new works developed through land-based and innovative dramaturgical processes and received the 2025 Patrick O’Neill Book Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research.

Lindsay is co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded project “Decolonizing Performative Re-enactments of History,” in collaboration with Dr. Selena Couture (University of Alberta). Earlier in her academic journey, she was recognized as a Bombardier Scholar and received SSHRC doctoral funding to support her research. She is a board member with both Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (Canada) and Theatre Research in Canada, and has served as Guest Faculty at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Lindsay is also the former Director of Native Earth Performing Arts’ Animikiig Creators Unit, a two-year development program for emerging Indigenous theatre creators.

Her work has been shared at events and conferences hosted by institutions and organizations including the National Arts Centre, the PuSh Festival, Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance, the Audain Gallery (SFU), Native Earth Performing Arts, Full Circle First Nations Performance, Carleton University, the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, CAPACOA, and the International Society for the Performing Arts.

Dr. Lachance is available for PhD candidacy supervision. If you are interested in working with her, please email her directly before applying.