Fay Nass
Fay Nass is a Vancouver-based director, writer, producer, curator, programmer and multi-disciplinary artist. They are the Artistic Director of the Frank Theatre Company and the founder/AD of Aphotic Theatre.
In the past two decades, Fay has been creating work across disciplines including Documentary film, narrative film, theatre, live performance and Audiovisual installations. Their work often examines questions of race, sex, language and culture through an intersectional lens to shift meanings and deconstruct paradigms rooted in our society. Fay is interested in the notion of Queering as a way of creating new aesthetic and innovative processes to challenge traditional forms and contemporary perceptions.
Fay’s work has been presented at PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, SummerWorks Festival, Queer Arts Festival, the CULTCH and Firehall Arts Centre. Their academic papers and experimental work have been presented at various conferences and artist-run galleries in the US, Spain, the UK, Germany and France. Their co-creation project Be-Longing was part of the 2021 New York International Film Festival, NICE International Film Festival and Madrid International Film Festival. Their short documentary film Art Connects Part 1 was the winner of the Hamburg Indie Film Festival for the best Documentary short in 2022.
Mother Tongues
Language is intertwined with culture. In many cases our relationship to our mother tongue reveals how close or distant we feel from our culture. Many people feel that in order to belong to their new country, they need to speak perfect English and forget about their mother tongue. Often, the erasure of language leads to erasure of one’s culture. The vision for this project is to celebrate the diversity of languages that one speaks and to create space for stories that exist outside of academic and Anglophone notions of queerness. Mother Tongues celebrates the intersectionality and the complexity of experiences of queer EAl speakers, and the layers in which they exist, both in the world and in relation to the languages of English and their mother tongue. The project involves four participanst who share their stories both in English as well as their mother tongues in Farsi, Spanish, Cantonese and Polish.
