​​Michele Decottignies

​Using the arts to affect personal and social transformation. 

​Michele Decottignies is a multiple award-winning producer, playwright, director, co-creator, administrator, advocate and activist with 30+ years of potent experience in the arts & voluntary sectors.

Michele spent the first 15 years of her career working with major theatre and film companies like Alberta Theatre Projects (fund development), Theatre Calgary (stage management), One Yellow Rabbit (turn-over crew), Lunchbox Theatre (fund development), The Arts Touring Alliance of Alberta (school touring initiative), Robert Cuffley Films (sound recording and mixing), White Iron Productions (lighting and electrics) and many others. 
 
She spent the last 20 years exclusively prioritizing equity & diversity in the arts through her own company, Stage Left Productions – a Popular Theatre company that serves as a conduit of artistic innovation and counter-culturalism for diverse artists, is a leading contributor Canada's Deaf, Disability & Mad Arts Domain and a global Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed. 

Through Stage Left, Michele has so far contributed to disability arts:  10 Disability Arts Festivals, 25 venue-based, professional productions;  50 site-specific, pop-up social justice encounters (aka invisible theatre scenes); 30 digital films; 25 independent artist commissions; 50+ amateur/ community-created productions; 75+ professional training labs; 10 self-advocacy & community inclusion programs; 14 national artists gatherings; and a whole lot more!

Michele is also the founder and Chair of The Deaf, Disability & Mad Arts Alliance of Canada (a non-normative National Arts Service Organization) and founder and co-Chair of the Calgary Congress for Equity & Diversity in the Arts; initiatives that she developed through Stage Left. 
 
Through Stage Left's Full Spectrum Arts Equity Program, Michele has put her arts-based equity practice in the service to the professional arts sector, as an: Arts equity consultant and training facilitator to The Professional Association of Canadian Theatres; arts equity advisor to the Canadian Dance Assembly; conference planning advisor to Mass Culture; and as a board member The Canadian Arts Presenting Association. She's also facilitated arts equity training for the BC Arts Council, Arts Commons, Calgary Arts Development, the BC Arts Council and others. 
 
Through Stage Left's Applied Theatre of the Oppressed Program, Michele has collaborated with over 300 diverse community groups on using the arts to affect both personal and social transformation. Since 2021, she has been artist-in-residence to UCalgary's Indigenous, Local and Global Health Office, with whom she is "co-creating the future of Public Health and social equity" - and advancing Truth & Reconciliation in the Cumming School of Medicine. 

As an under-educated, working class, lesbian feminist artist/ activist with several invisible disabilities, Michele's  artistic vision is necessarily concerned with the development of artistic and cultural practices that foster rather than negate diversity. Her art work is multidisciplinary, collaborative and radical – using the arts to challenge dominant social paradigms that render difference invisible and/ or undesirable in society.

She graduated with distinction from Mount Royal College’s Theatre Arts Diploma Program, and managed to get a largely self-directed BFA in Secondary Drama Education from the University of Calgary. She also took professional broadcast, film and video production training at SAIT.
 
In her non-working life, she enjoys protecting nature and the non-human animals that live in it, paddling, snowshoeing and skating in the mountains and spending time with cats, birds, lizards, frogs, weevils, birds and bees – plus a few select people.

Visit Stage Left's website.

Mercy Killing or Murder? 2003

Notwithstanding. 2005

Time To Put My Socks On. 2010

Women's Work. 2013

 A Stage Left Production: 
​ Non-normalizing disability theatre, since 1999!

"A hilarious sexual romp!" (Laurie Fyffe, Capital Critics' Circle)

HEADER PHOTO CREDITS
We thank The Great Canadian Theatre Company for the photoshoot and use of that image; as well as Jared Davidson, for being our model (in drag!). 

​Making the invisible VISIBLE
c/o Box 8007 CANMORE MAIN
Canmore, Alberta   T1W 2T8

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transgressive ART. 
intersecting CULTURES.
non-normative AESTHETICS.