Tara Goldstein
Tara Goldstein is a professor, ethnographer and playwright at the University of Toronto where she teaches an undergraduate course called Equity, Activism and Education for the Equity Studies program at New College and a graduate course called Gender, Sexuality and Schooling for the Curriculum and Pedagogy program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Tara’s most recent books are Teaching Gender and Sexuality: Letters to Teachers (Taylor & Francis, 2019) and Our children Are Your Students: LGBTQ Families Speak Out (Myers Education Press, 2021).
In July 2020, Tara began a three-year appointment as Vice Principal of New College at the University of Toronto.
Tara is also the Founding and Artistic Director of Gailey Road Productions, a theatre company that produces research-informed theatre on social and political issues that affect us all (www.gaileyroad.com). She graduated from the MFA Playwriting Program at Spalding University, Louisville, Kentucky, in November 2006.
Tara’s historical drama Lost Daughter won the 2005 Canadian Jewish Playwriting Contest and was produced by Gailey Road at the 2008 Toronto Fringe Festival. The play was published as one of the three plays in an anthology called Zero Tolerance and Other Plays (Sense Publishers 2013).
Harriet’s House, a contemporary drama about international adoption in an LGBTQ family, was produced at Hart House Theatre in July 2010, and has been published as part of her book Staging Harriet’s House: Writing and Producing Research-Informed Theatre (Peter Lang 2012).
Castor and Sylvie about French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and her companion Sylvie Le Bon was workshopped at the Toronto SummerWorks Festival in 2015, revised and then performed the L Fest in Llandudno, Wales in 2018.
Tara’s most recent play Out at School, written with Jenny Salisbury and Pam Baer, is a verbatim theatre piece based on interviews with LGBTQ families about their experiences at elementary and high school (www.lgbtqfamiliesspeakout.ca). It was also performed at the L Fest in Llandudno, Wales in 2018 and at the Toronto Pride Festival in June 2019. Out at School can be heard as an audio-play on popular podcast players: https://kite.link/OAS-audioplay
Tara is currently working on a new performance project called The Love Booth and Other Stories.
The Love Booth is about a little-known moment of queer activism at the American Psychological Association (APA) conference in 1972 where queer activists organized an academic panel called “Psychiatry: Friend or Foe to Homosexuals”.
The panel featured Dr. H. Anonymous, a closeted gay psychiatrist who participated in disguise, wearing an oversized tuxedo, a wig, and a mask. Using a voice-distorting microphone, Dr. H. Anonymous gave a blistering speech about the destructive effects of homosexuality being labelled a sickness by the field of psychiatry.
This moment of queer activism resulted in the APA taking homosexuality off the list of mental disorders in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, changing the lives of countless people who no longer felt they needed to be cured of the feelings they had for the people they loved.
The 50th anniversary of the APA’s 1973 removal of homosexuality from the DSM is coming up in 2023, and Tara is planning to stage the performance project as part of the Toronto Pride Festival in June 2023.
Bronwyn Garden-Smith (Research Assistant)
Bronwyn Garden-Smith (she/her or they/them) is a 5th year undergraduate student studying Psychology, Critical Studies in Equity and Solidarity, and English at the University of Toronto. She believes that the healing power of mutual aid, transformative justice, community care, food, art, music and laughter will help build an abolitionist, decolonial future. She spends her days imagining, writing about, and organizing to create a world in which there is justice and peace for racialized, disabled and mad, women, queer, two-spirit, trans, and otherwise marginalized people.
Kohle Handleman-Kerman (Research Assistant)
Kohle is an undergraduate student completing an Honours Bachelor of Science with a Psychology Specialist and a Sexual Diversity Studies Minor. As an emerging queer-identified researcher, they strive to create an empathetic and grounded research praxis focusing on Queer and Trans issues. They recently had a literature review of Transgender Mental Health Care published in Arbor, the University of Toronto’s Undergraduate Research Journal. They are looking towards interdisciplinary graduate studies in Psychology and Gender and Sexual Diversity Studies.
Bishop Owis (Research Assistant)
Bishop (they/she) is a teacher, community activist and PhD candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). She is a graduate of the Masters of Teaching program where she earned her teaching qualifications in the Junior-Intermediate division.
Bishop’s doctoral research at OISE asks how do educators practice an ethic of care when working with QTBIPOC youth? Their research celebrates queer/trans of colour knowledge and centers thriving, joy and justice. Bishop is an alumni Junior Fellow at Massey College, a former organizer of Queer/Trans at OISE and has delivered sex education workshops Planned Parenthood and the Sex Education Centre at the University of Toronto. Bishop currently works on two research teams (LGBTQ Families Speak Out and Addressing Injustices) and teaches at the University of Toronto and Trent University.
Bishop’s academic interests include arts-based educational research, auto theory, social media and youth mobilization, visual/digital archival research and other public pedagogies.