Claire Mason - Assistant Teaching Professor (Purdue University)

 Katherine Morley - Researcher-In-Residence (The Egg)

Heather Fitzsimmons Frey -Associate Professor and Chair of Arts And Cultural Management at Macewan University, Edmonton, Canada 

Ha Young Hwang - Professor of Theatre for Young Audiences at Korea National University of Arts

Claire Mason Claire Mason is an Assistant Teaching Professor with the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program at Purdue University and currently serves as the Secretary General of ITYARN. A transdisciplinary educator, scholar, and performer, she received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, specializing in Theatre for Youth, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the agency and empowerment of meaning making and the spectator experience. She was thrilled to have been a Next Generation Artist at the Beijing Artistic Gathering and is privileged to have created work across North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Dr Katherine Morley is a researcher, writer and advocate for theatre and dance for young audiences. Her principal research interests are spectatorship, and the role of sound in performance. She is based in the UK, though her work is international in its reach. Katherine’s doctoral research was conducted at the University of Manchester and her thesis Spectatorship in Theatre for Early Years: towards a working taxonomy of relative stillness is available at the UoM research repository. The relationship between sound and relative silence was at the forefront of Katherine’s contribution to the 2023 Small Size publication, Mapping Research: A map on the aesthetics of performing arts for early years. Katherine works internationally as a performance development consultant and as a creative learning advocate. She is researcher-in-residence at the egg, TRB and currently writing for Springer’s ‘Performing Arts in Early Childhood Education: Aesthetics and Meaning Actions’ due for publication in 2025.

Heather Fitzsimmons Frey is an Associate Professor of Arts and Cultural Management at MacEwan University in Edmonton. Her research focuses on performance for, by, and with young people. She uses a range of research methodologies and frameworks including archival research, performance-based inquiry, performance-based historiography, and qualitative research. She began doing research regarding theatre for the early years demographic the Toronto WeeFestival’s scholar-in-residence. Currently she directs Elm Tree Theatre productions, collaorating with artists and early childhood educators to create meaningful immersive theatre experiences for the very young. Her recent TYA research is published in Canadian Theatre Review, Critical Stages/Scènes Critique, Performance Matters, Performance Research, Research in Drama Education (RiDE), Theatre Research in Canada/ Recherches théâtrales au Canada, and Theatre Research International, and in several book chapters including The Routledge Handbook of Drama in Education (2022) and Diversity, Representation, Culture (2022), and Off Book (2023).

Ha Young HWANG is Professor of Theatre for Young Audiences at Korea National University of Arts where she leads a 3-year MFA programme in TYA. She returned to Seoul after completing her PhD at University of Exeter and teaching/researching at National University of Singapore, through which she grew her interest in the interactive and intercultural dimensions of contemporary TYA. She teaches both theories and practices of TYA including improvisation and theatre-making for/with young people. She is the Lead Editor of Young Asian Shakespeares as part of A|S|I|A (Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive) and her articles were published in Youth and Performance, Theatre Forum, Drama, Play and Education, Arts Education Series (Korean National Research Centre for the Arts), etc. (in English or Korea)