About Us
The Black Theatre Lab is dedicated to investigating and amplifying Black stories, artistry, and creators. We strive to create a broad diasporic space for reflecting on Black theatre in its various forms and practices, celebrating the richness and diversity of Blackness through research, performance, and community activation within the University of Toronto Mississauga and the broader GTA.
UTM’s Black Theatre Lab is dedicated to:
Documenting Black theatre diasporically – as generative to Black life and Black people (research-oriented)
Making/practicing Black performance projects (doing)
Nurturing Black Theatre performance and scholarship (community engagement)
Our Team
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Director
Dr. Leticia L. Ridley is an Assistant Professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto, Mississauga (UTM), where she holds a Canada Research Chair II in Black theatre and Performance. Her primary teaching and research areas include contemporary African American theatre and performance, Black feminism, Black performance theory, and the intersections of Black digital studies and popular performance.
Leticia earned a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, and her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation (where she was a Predoctoral Fellow) and the Mellon-funded African American Digital Humanities program (AADHum). Leticia has published scholarly articles in the following journals: Theatre Journal, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, the August Wilson Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Theater History Studies. In 2025, she received an honorable mention for the Gerald Kahan Scholar from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) for her essay, “A Grammar of Abolition: Black Theatrical Geographies.” She has also published in a number of critical anthologies, including Routledge Anthology of Sports Plays, Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity, Staging Difficult Pasts, and The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre. In 2024, she received an honorable mention for the Gerald Kahan Scholar from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) for her co-written essay, "Staging the Story of a People: The Politics of Co-Performance at Washington D.C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.”
Leticia is also the co-producer and co-host of Daughters of Lorraine, a Black feminist theatre podcast supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons, and a recurring co-host on On Tap: A Theatre & Performance Studies Podcast. She is also a freelance dramaturg, who has worked with numerous theatres in the United States
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Associate Director
Dr. Signy Lynch is Assistant Professor in English & Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and a graduate faculty member at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. Her areas of research and teaching specialization include contemporary intercultural, diasporic, and Black theatres in Canada; audience research; and theatre criticism. Her peer-reviewed and public-facing articles appear in publications including Theatre Research in Canada, Contemporary Theatre Review, Canadian Theatre Review, Comedy Studies, New Theatre Quarterly, alt.theatre, SpiderWebShow’s Cdn Times, and Intermission Magazine. She is co-editor of Canadian Theatre Review volume 186, “Theatre After the Explosion” (Spring 2021) and the forthcoming Testifyin’: African Canadian Plays, Volume 3 (2027) with Djanet Sears. She is co-facilitator of the Toronto Fringe’s New Young Reviewers Program, and also co-director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (centreforspectatorship.com)
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Graduate Research Assistant
Matthew Molinaro (he/him) is a first-year PhD student in the Department of English and Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His interdisciplinary research centres the literatures and histories of the African diaspora, Caribbean, and hemispheric Americas, in concert with feminist theory, social movements, and performance studies. Matthew’s current project traces the aesthetic and political revivals of internationalism across the Black Atlantic. With an extensive history of activism and journalism, Matthew regularly brings his intellectual passions to public fora and community mobilization. His work appears or is forthcoming in Cultural Critique Online, Canadian Women’s Studies, The Local, and Topia. An improviser and journalist by training, Matthew is dedicated to promoting and celebrating the radical creativity of artists and performers in Toronto and abroad.