Research/Performance Team
Naila Kuhlmann
Project Lead
Emily Thorne
Multi-Media Artist
Laurie Archambault
Performer
Anne-fay Audet Johnston
Performer
Louise Savard
Project Participant
Soraya Lahlou
Project Participant
Jérémie Robert
Director
Anusha Kamesh
Musician/Researcher
Greg Selinger
Performer
Ariane Boulet
Dance Facilitator
Serge Boily
Project Participant
Sonja Soo
Project Participant
Jennifer Lecuyer
Director
Louise Campbell
Musician
Heidi Blais
Performer
Rebecca Barnstaple
Dance Facilitator
Birdie Gregor
Assistant Director
Caroline Barbier de Reulle
Musician
Claire Honda
Performer
Lili Saint Laurent
Project Participant
Kevin Chen
Project Participant
Gisle Henriet
Project Participant
Lauren Bechard
Project Participant
Sheida Rabipour
Project Participant
Naomi Silver-Vézina
Cinematographer
Kristin Piljay
Web Designer
Photo by Alex Tran
Naila Kuhlmann
Naila is a postdoctoral student at McGill, co-supervised by Dr. Stefanie Blain-Moraes and Dr. Aliki Thomas. She obtained her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of British Columbia, in which she studied the neurobiology of Parkinson's disease in a genetic mouse model. Given a particular interest in dance and circus, Naila dabbled in art-science collaborations throughout her studies, including with Vancouver-based Curiosity Collider and the Convergence Initiative in Montreal. This prompted her to start the Piece of Mind Collective with several enthusiastic, like-minded individuals back in 2018, and to pursue a postdoc in arts-based knowledge translation in 2020. Naila is also co-founder of the "Green Labs Initiative @ McGill", which aims to reduce the environmental impact of research, and a regular host on the "AMiNDR: A Month in Neurodegenerative Disease Research" podcast.
Jérémie Robert
Jérémie has worked in the circus arts field for the past 15 years. He performed more than 2500 shows with companies such as 7 Fingers, Cirque Éloize, Cirque du Soleil, Circus Monti, Company XY, and Kalabanté. On top of his on-stage career, he explores creation as the designer and co-director on many projects, and is now the artistic co-director of Throw 2 Catch. His will to share his passion brought him to coaching (Cirque du Soleil, Circus Monti, Montreal's National Circus School, Artcirq), and, in a social circus context, to organizing and directing workshops on 6 continents. These workshops were an opportunity for him to connect with local communities and help youth at risk.
Jennifer Lecuyer
Jennifer has a passion for investigating movement and creation through various forms. With a BFA in Design for the Theatre from Concordia University and 16 years of figure skating, she dove intensely into the world of dance and aerial arts. After graduating from The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, she toured the world with Cavalia as a dancer and aerialist. For the better part of the last 13 years she has been on road touring first as an artist, eventually as artistic assistant, and recently as artistic director of Bazzar, a Cirque du Soleil show. When in Montreal she uses her degree in design as well as her performing career to support various independent artists, events and shows. As an artistic director, Jennifer is known for her strong leadership skills, her sensitivity to people and the work, and her detail-oriented approach. As an artist, she is a generous performer, known for the connections she creates with the audience. She is thrilled to be part of Piece of Mind as artistic director and performer.
Birdie Gregor
Birdie Gregor works as a theatre artist and stage manager throughout Canada. Her passion has led her to all stages of story creation and development, trying her hand at everything from directing, to teaching, producing, and writing. Coined as a free spirit before she could walk, Birdie has been a storyteller since the first day she discovered the magic of making people laugh.
Birdie is a country girl with big city dreams and divides her time, residing in both Montreal, QC and her hometown in Cape Breton, NS, trying to get the best of both worlds. Throughout the last decade of her career she has had the privilege to collaborate on some meaningful and amazing work, including Angelique (Black Theatre Workshop/Tableau D’Hôte Theatre – META winner Outstanding PACT production & Outstanding Contribution to Theatre); Punch Up (Theatre Brouhaha presented by Highland Arts Theatre – Atlantic Fringe's Best of Festival Winner) and her theatre company Playshed's first production, COCK, which was nominated for the Outstanding Independent Production META in 2016.
Emily Thorne
Emily is a graduate of The National Theatre School of Canada in production and design, and has worked as a multimedia designer, stage manager, technical director, and production director, in various live and immersive award winning productions. After touring around the world with Cirque Eloize, she has valuable experience in leading teams, operating shows, and creating memorable experiences for the public. She is a patient, experienced, and innovative artist as well as leader. Presently working at Moment Factory, her modus operandi is to develop courage, strength and trust within a team while contributing her talents and remaining open to learning. She aims to expand her understanding of Dementia and Parkinson's, while collaborating with talented individuals with whom she can continue to evolve.
Anusha Kamesh
Anusha is a PhD candidate studying Parkinson’s disease at the Montreal Neurological Institute. Soon after moving to Montreal to pursue her education, she became enamoured with the local music and arts scene and continues to find opportunities to explore these in her free time. Her classical training in piano has evolved into writing indie and electronic music, and for Piece of Mind (pun intended), she contributes to the project as a researcher, composer, and musician. Between Piece of Mind, serving as a host and editing manager for the AMiNDR podcast, song-writing, exploring the world of cooking and baking, and her recent pursuit of creating shampoo bars, she rarely spends a moment bored. This is especially true in the company of such talented and inspiring individuals as those in the Piece of Mind collective.
Louise Campbell
Louise Campbell is a Montreal-based musician whose professional hats range from clarinettist to conductor, community arts facilitator to musicians’ health therapist. As a performer, improviser and composer, Louise seeks to interrogate and renew the ways in which we make music by creating new works with everyone, regardless of age, ability, level of prior experience, or training. Her specializations include improvisation and creation with untrained (aka ‘amateur’) musicians, improvised conducting, cross-disciplinary creation, commissioned works, and public engagement. She has toured as a performer, guest artist, and lecturer of improvised and composed musics across Canada, the US, France, Germany, and Brazil.
Caroline Barbier de Reulle
Caroline Barbier de Reulle is a musician and musicologist. Her publications and projects are based on an interdisciplinary approach and mainly study the relationships between music and other arts. Holder of a PhD in Music and Musicology from Paris-Sorbonne University, she is the author of a thesis entitled Salvador Dalí and music (2017). She is currently doing researches about circus music with French and Quebec companies. For Piece of Mind, she is collaborating as a composer and performing musician (piano, violin, voice) to create music related to poetry, dreams and lived experience.
Laurie Archambault
Laurie Archambault, also known as Quantalock, is a passionate individual who participates in a myriad of projects. She is a medical physicist working in a hospital, and has been actively involved in the locking dance scene in Montreal for the past 15 years. As a member of the collective Lock Unity, she choreographed and interpreted many pieces, including a participation at the 100lux festival. She developed the art of freestyling through cyphers and battles in Canada and abroad. In 2019, she had the opportunity to reprensent Canada with Lock Unity at the event KOD in China. For the last 3 years, she co-organized the locking event Unlock The Funk. In the last 2 years, she participated in the Piece of Mind project with great enthousiam!
Photo: Benjamin Von Wong
Greg “Krypto” Selinger
Greg “Krypto” Selinger has interpreted for Solid State Breakdance Collective and choreographed the trio Still Milking the New Sacred Cow under the mentorship of Victor Quijada. Greg’s work often blends dance and spoken word, a practice which he developed throughout his Contemporary Dance BFA at Concordia University. His autobiographical danced monologue A Piece of: My Heart (Breaking) has been presented in Montreal, Quebec City, Ontario, Germany, and Mexico. He is the founder of the interdisciplinary improvisation collective Body Slam. In 2015, he interpreted for The Dietrich Group’s Dora award-winning piece This is a Costume Drama. He has also directed his childhood breakdance hero Jacob “Kujo” Lyons in Creative Extremist. He is a dancer in Piece of Mind, having met Naila at Laurie Archambault's locking class, and connected over their mutual interest in neuroscience.
Heidi Blais
Heidi is an interdisciplinary movement artist and teacher with a focus on balance, collaborative play and group acrobatics. Her disciplines include slackline, acroyoga, hand-to-hand, and contact improvisation. Some highlights of her career involve traversing a 1.9 and 2.0 km-long highline over the mine of Asbestos, Quebec in the years of 2018 and 2019 respectively. She appreciated the opportunity to connect with former mine-workers and hear their stories. Also, in Barcelona 2019, she gave an acroyoga workshop for social workers, entitled "Accessing Gratitude," where she presented exercises from environmentalist author Joanna Macy towards creating human sculptures that spoke of our larger networks of support. Currently, Heidi is working with the circus group "Acting for Climate" to create shows that strive to reduce carbon emissions while bringing audiences closer to nature. Heidi is involved in the research, creation and performance of Piece of Mind.
Claire Honda
Claire grew up in Vancouver, BC, and is currently a PhD student in neuroscience at McGill University, with a focus on bilingualism and the brain. Besides being fascinated by languages and how we learn them, she loves to be physically and artistically active. She is a passionate tap dancer, having traveled to tap events in the US, Sweden, France, Germany, and Spain. She also enjoys doing capoeira, dancing Colombian salsa, and playing violin. She is excited to be bringing together her different scientific, artistic, and social interests through this project.
Anne-fay Audet Johnston
Anne-fay Audet Johnston is a circus artist from Quebec. Specializing in swinging trapeze and hand balancing, she knows how to brush the sky with the tips of her toes and how to root herself to the ground to become one with it. She cultivated her interest in circus through a professional training at the National Circus School from 2006 to 2009. Since then, she has explored many facets of professional circus, both in Canada and abroad. She has participated in several contemporary circus creations, including Cie les Confins, directed by Kevin McCoy, Bianco from the Nofit State company, directed by Firenza Guidi, and Féria de Flip Fabrique, directed by Olivier Normand. She has also worked with Haut-Vol productions, Cirque de la Pointe-Sèche, Cirque Éloize and Cirque du Soleil for special and corporate events. In parallel to her work in circus, Anne-fay teaches at the École de cirque de Québec and is pursuing studies in anthropology at Université Laval. Through her research, she seeks to shed light on the social levers that surround the profession of circus artist. Anne-fay continues to deepen her reflections on the partnerships between the circus and social involvement, notably with the Research Chair in Emergency Medicine and the performance-conference project, Urgences Rurales 360.
Ariane Boulet
Ariane Boulet is a dance artist who actively works as both a performer and creator, and as co-director of the organization Je suis Julio, which uses a model of horizontal management — placing value on listening and community — to reflect on our artistic practices. As a performer, she has been enthusiastically immersed in the studio and on stage for some twenty choreographies since 2009. Within Je suis Julio, she has created and co-created a dozen cinematic, scenic, in situ and performative works driven by a symbolism that links the intimate to the political through different territories. Ariane completed a master's degree in dance in 2014, in which she explored creation in the context of a care environment. Since 2015, she has been guiding her flagship project of dance visits in residential and long-term care centres (CHSLD), which integrates dance into a residential context for people with loss of autonomy and at end-of-life, and offers them a privileged and sensitive contact to their bodies and their creativity. She has since facilitated two hundred dance visits in some twenty CHSLDs in Montreal and the surrounding area. The implementation of her innovative projects and the co-management of her unique organizational model have allowed her to acquire excellent project management and facilitation skills. She also acts as a cultural mediator and teaches professional workshops, to deploy the importance of creating contexts in which to experience dance and transform our sensitive relationship to the world.
Rebecca Barnstaple
Rebecca Barnstaple is a Postdoctoral Fellow at York University engaged in research on the neurobiological effects of dance in health and disease. A graduate of the National Centre for Dance Therapy at Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal (2015), she also provides dance-therapy based programs for people with chronic pain, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's, and is a core instructor for IMPROVment, an organisation providing movement-based interventions for brain and body health at Wake Forest University in North Carolina (http://www.improvment.us/). Rebecca is a member of the steering committee of Dance Movement Therapy Ontario, the Research and Practice committee of the American Dance Therapy association, and the Groupe d'intérêt scientifique of the NCDT.
Lili Saint Laurent
Young? Still a little! Parkinson? Fully living it! Optimist? Definitely! Artist? All the time!
It started with a crazy challenge : the refusal to be swept up by Parkinson's at 40 years old. To transcend it, she had to tame the disease. To transform it into a source of inspiration and creation. That was the beginning of her blog and website, Fils de Park's. The aim? To talk about Parkinson's disease in a different way, using poetry and humour.
Since then, she has published several works, including Wanted, a poetry collection. At La Huchette (Paris), she partnered with Rémi Prosper to put her texts and poems on stage in Fragments dopaminergiques, read by the fabulous actors : Emma Santini, Pierre Santini et Jean Claude Drouot.
Lili joined the Piece Of Mind Collective, not only as an artist but also to share her experiences as a person with young-onset Parkinson's disease.
Photo: Andreas Bogner
Louise Savard
Louise was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in March 2015. She retired from the dental field as of July 2019, in which she worked for 32 years. Louise started her yoga practice 15 years ago, and more recently studied positive psychology, Ayurveda, naturopathy, and art therapy. In, February 2020, after three years of training in Hatha, Ashtanga, chair yoga and yoga for neurological conditions, she became a certified yoga teacher. She hopes to share her resilience in face of Parkinson's disease by providing yoga sessions to other people living with neurodegenerative diseases or reduced mobility. For this project, Louise shared her knowledge not only from the perspective of someone with Parkinson's disease, but also as someone trained in movement and mindfulness.
Serge Boily
Serge was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease about 2 years ago. He is the proud father of two high-achieving adolescent daughters, and has worked as a production supervisor for Polycor over the past 20 years. Serge is a go-getter who continues to fight to make Parkinson's disease recognized as an occupational illness, and who has contributed significant time and energy to the "Victimes des Pesticides" group. He runs and boxes regularly, and contributed his humour and infectuous enthusiasm to the Piece of Mind team.
Kevin Chen
Kevin is an entrepreneur in biotechnology, who is enthusiastic about startups, science and community organization. In his spare time, he loves juggling, circus arts and Bboying. Kevin is currently the CEO of a local biotech startup, an organizer for Montreal's own community bio lab called Bricobio. He is also a member of the organizing team for the Global Community Biosummit Fellowship program and serves on International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM)'s Human Practices Committee. Kevin first became interested in the combination of art and science through inspiration from the Dance Your PhD program and his work in the iGEM competition, for which he helped lead a team to present their scientific work while using dance as a supporting tool in 2012.
Gisle Henriet
Born in Uppsala, Sweden, Gisle first studied at Cirkus Cirkör in Stockholm for 3 years. In 2004, at the age of 19, Gisle left his native country to pursue his training at the National Circus School of Montreal, where he specialized in teeterboard and trampoline. Since graduating in 2007, Gisle has worked for many prestigious companies such as Les 7 Doigts de la Main (PSY, Luces Fugaces, Traces), Cirque Éloize (Cirkopolis), TNM (Moby Dick) and the National Theatre of Norway. He has also participated in numerous summer and street festivals. He performed at the Royal Variety Show and at the closing ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. Gisle is artistic co-director for the Throw 2 Catch circus company, and joins Jérémie in the artistic direction for Piece of Mind.
Soraya Lahlou
Soraya is a PhD Candidate at the Neuro where she is investigating memory in Parkinson's disease patients. She is particularly interested in how memories are maintained and supported over time. Her research is currently supported by the Fonds de Recherche Québécois en Santé - Parkinson Quebec (FRQS). Aside of her love for brains, she also loves drawing and attending random dance workshops. She loves creating, in both scientific and artistic contexts, and helped bring these together throughout this project.
Lauren Bechard
Lauren is a graduate student in the University of Waterloo's collaborative Aging, Health & Well-Being program, an Alzheimer Society Research Program Doctoral Scholar, and Co-Chair of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration and Aging Trainee Society. As a researcher, Lauren's vision is "more years, lived well, by choosing better", which she supports through conducting research on how physical activity can help people promote later life cognitive health and live well with dementia. In the Piece of Mind Project, Lauren is a researcher partnering with artists to translate concepts from research on frailty, exercise, and cognition in dementia using art. Lauren is proud to collaborate with people living with dementia and care partners as active partners in the research process, not just participants, and brought this enthusiasm for engagement of people with lived experience of dementia to the Piece of Mind project.
Sonja Soo
Sonja is a PhD student at McGill University studying neuroscience. She studied Alzheimer's disease during her Master's and is and now concentrating on aging and neurodegeneration for her PhD. She is originally from Vancouver, BC and loves being outdoors to hike along trails and bike around the city. Some of her other interests include reading good books and baking for her friends. Sonja is passionate about bridging the gap between scientists, artists and the public, and contributed her knowledge of neurodegeneration to this project.
Sheida Rabipour
Sheida Rabipour received her Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Neuroscience from McGill University, and her PhD in Psychology from the University of Ottawa. Her research examines factors that can influence and enhance brain function throughout life. Her work has been supported by agencies such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de Recherche Québec - Santé, and the Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music. Sheida is also passionate about science communication and founded an award-winning community outreach organization to promote knowledge transfer. Her latest book, How (Not) To Train The Brain, was recently published by Oxford University Press. https://49thshelf.com/Books/H/How-not-to-train-the-brain
Naomi Silver-Vézina
Naomi Silver-Vézina’s unyielding thirst for creation manifests itself in her passion for film, music and visual arts. A cinephile since birth, she graduated from Mel Hoppenheim’s Film Production program in 2016 with a specialization in camera work. Since then, she has pursued her love for visual storytelling through varied multidisciplinary projects, letting different art forms interact and coalesce.
Kristin Piljay
Kristin is a lover of dance, music and neurons, hence why she became part of this project. Her interest in combining science and art has a long history, including many previous years working as a photographer and photo researcher for higher education science textbooks. She also has been passionate for a long time about the study of the brain. She studied dance (ballet, modern jazz, belly dance, flamenco) and gymnastics since the age of 5 and was an aerialist for 13 years. Additionally, Kristin is the web designer for this site.
.... check back here for a few more participant bios soon!