Board of Directors
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Yvette Nolan
President | Pronouns: she/her/hers
Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) is a playwright, director and dramaturg who works across Turtle Island. Her works include the plays The Art of War, The Unplugging, Annie Mae’s Movement, The Birds (a modern adaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy), The Diviners (with Vern Thiessen), the dance-opera Bearing, the libretto Shawnadithit, and the play-for-film Katharsis. She co-created, with Joel Bernbaum and Lancelot Knight, the verbatim play Reasonable Doubt, about relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan. From 2003-2011, she served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. Her book, Medicine Shows, about Indigenous performance in Canada was published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015, and Performing Indigeneity (co-edited with Ric Knowles) in 2016. She has served on various boards, including the Playwrights Union of Canada, Playwrights Canada Press, accesscopyright, Saskatchewan Association of Theatre Professionals, and Common Weal Community Arts. She recently defended her Master’s thesis, about governance in non-profit theatres, at Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, titled On the Brink: Theatres Search for a Post-Pandemic Model.
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Justin Neal
Director | Pronouns: he/him/his
After fifteen years juggling marketing and editorial production day jobs in San Francisco & New York with amateur theatre at night, Justin Neal relocated to his family’s traditional Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) lands to earn a Joint Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Theatre from the University of British Columbia. Founding Holy Crow Arts in 2020, his plays So Damn Proud and Keepers of the Salish Sea have premiered through funding awarded by First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Squamish Nation, BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and the City of Vancouver, among others. Neal’s screenplays have placed in dozens of festival competitions and writing programs across Turtle Island and have received development funds from Telefilm, the Indigenous Screen Office, and Creative BC. He is an alumnus of the Toronto-based Canadian Film Centre’s Norman Jewison Film Program Writers’ Lab and is a 2024-25 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University.
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Marlene Ferhatoğlu
Treasurer | Pronouns: she/her/hers
Marlene is a first-generation Turkish-American marketing and events specialist in the arts industry. Having moved to Canada over 19 years ago in the ancestral lands of the Metis people, known as Saskatoon, Marlene gained a Bachelor’s in Commerce for Marketing and International Business. While there, Marlene volunteered at the Saskatoon Open Door Society to provide newly landed immigrants and refugees with resources to overcome barriers in Canada.
Eventually, her work in digital marketing and art led to a career in Vancouver where she works for the Vancouver Visual Art Foundation as the Project Manager. Her work at the non-profit organization has produced several visual art events with the goal of growing Vancouver’s visual art scene to international audiences.
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Selena Couture
Secretary | Pronouns: she/her/hers
Selena Couture is a white settler scholar and Associate Professor (Drama) at U of Alberta in Treaty 6 territory / Métis Region No.4. She writes about history, performance and relationships to land: deconstructing settler colonial whiteness and possession while foregrounding the maintenance of Indigenous places through performance.
Publications include, Against the Current and Into the Light: Performing History and Land in Coast Salish Territories and Vancouver’s Stanley Park and On this Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land (with her partner and daughters).She is a co-director of the Ecologies research cluster with Hemispheric Encounters and part of the Kule scholar cohort focusing on Climate Resilience in the 21st Century. She was an alternative school teacher in Vancouver for 20 years before studying for her doctorate in theatre at UBC. She also sits on the board of Solid State Community Industries.
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Erika Latta
Director | Pronouns: she/her/hers
Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Erika Latta is the artistic co-director and co-founder of WaxFactory in New York City. WaxFactory continues to nurture a hybrid approach, based on unconventional narrative styles, originally dramaturgy, visual and physical rigor, technological experimentation and site-responsive work. With the company, she works as a director, writer, actor, sound designer and educator. As an actor and director she has presented work in international venues and festivals throughout Europe and Latin America creating long lasting partnerships with artists and designers. She holds a BFA in Theater from the University of Washington, and an MFA in Acting from Columbia University. Erika is also an associate director of the French trans-media company Begat Theater. For Begat, she co-conceived, directed, designed sound and co-wrote several of Begat productions. Begat Theater’s productions have been awarded numerous grants, co-productions and partnerships, as well as the generous support from FACE (French American Fund for Contemporary Theater). Erika is a member of the Society of Authors (SACD) in France, and she continues to author and co-author many of the original productions for both WaxFactory and Begat Theater. Outside her company, she has worked with Felix Barret and Maxine Doyle of Punchdrunk (SLEEP NO MORE), Robert Wilson at the Watermill Center, Anne Bogart (SITI Company), Robert Woodruff, Victor Gautier Martin, Tina Landau, and Chuck Mee, among others. She continues to work in cinema both as an actor, director and photographer in feature length films, hybrid performance and new media. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the School For the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Theater and Performance.
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Naomi Campbell
Director | Pronouns: she/her/hers
Naomi Campbell (she/her) has over 35 years of programming, touring, and producing experience, both nationally and internationally. She has worked with a range of performing arts companies in various roles and was the originating producer for Nightswimming and Mammalian Diving Reflex; she’s also worked at festivals including World Stage, Rhubarb!, and Magnetic North Theatre Festival. At Luminato Festival Toronto she produced large-scale shows like The Life and Death of Marina Abramović and Apocalypsis, and as the Director of Artistic Development commissioned developed and produced new works for the festival. She was appointed Luminato’s Deputy Artistic Director in 2017 and was Artistic Director from 2018 to 2023. Naomi teaches at Queen’s University, the National Theatre School, and University of Toronto Scarborough, and is currently involved in projects across the country, variously as producer, dramaturg, director, and consultant.
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Dale Darychuk
Director | Pronouns: he/him/his
Dale Darychuk grew up in the Kootenays. He attended the University of Chicago where he received a B.A. in Linguistics. He then returned to Canada to attend law school at the University of Toronto. He met his future wife when they both volunteered at the Powerhouse Theatre in Vernon. His career focused on litigation particularly representing injured persons and disinherited individuals. For several years, he was President of Access Pro-Bono which provides free legal services to meet the critical needs of individuals and non-profit organizations across BC. He practiced in Port Coquitlam and New Westminster for 35 years and is now retired and living in Kelowna where he has taken up rowing and tap dancing. He continues to support all manner of the arts including a recent excursion into being a record producer.
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Boomer Stacey
Director | Pronouns: he/him/his
Boomer is a mixed-blood settler/immigrant with roots extending to Cornwall (England), Sri Lanka, Nederlands and Portugal. Boomer has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University, with a focus on photography, painting and drawing. Before joining Boca, Boomer served as the Executive Director of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT) as well as an Artistic Advisor at the New Victory Theater in New York City. Boomer has also provided leadership for the International Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY) based in Philadelphia, PA, as Executive Director, as well as Artistic Director of the Milk International Children’s Festival of the Arts at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. Boomer exhibits nomadic tendencies, is a social introvert, loves to cook, excels at gazing into campfires, loves a good IPA or single malt, and lives to explore the coastlines of the world.