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Lara Aysal

(1986)

Theater Artist

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Lara is a climate justice and human rights activist, performance artist, facilitator of community-oriented projects. She has collaborated with a variety of communities in South Africa, South America, Turkey, Italy, Germany and so-called Canada and worked across borders with international theatre companies and facilitated research projects in development and conflict settings with refugees, prisoners, ethnic minorities and Indigenous communities. She is one of the co-founders of AA+A Contemporary Performance Research Project and Ray Performance Collective. Before moving to Canada, she taught first- and second year acting classes at Beykent University and published individual and collaborative ideas on Conference of the Parties (COP20), civil disobedience, theatre in conflict zones and poems on possibilities of hope. She is interested in the role of theatre to address, organize and take action within climate justice context though decolonizing methodologies. She finds joy in experimenting with tools of theatre to disturb everyday life.

Lara received her BA (Honours) from Bilkent University Acting Department and her MA in Advanced Acting from Bahcesehir University and an MA degree in Applied Theatre at UVic. She is currently doing her PhD in Interdisciplinary Program at UBC. She is also an artist in residence at Greenpeace Canada and International Center of Arts for Social Change.

She is currently working on how performative inquiry, as a medium for dialogue, could stem collaboration between various knowledge systems, environmental organizations and institutions for co-creating collective strategies on the climate crisis.