2021-2022 Artists in Residence
The Public Energy Local Artist Residency supports an artist’s creative process at any stage of development.
The program is open to all artists living in Peterborough and neighbouring counties, as well as Treaty 20
Territory of the Williams Treaties. Public Energy’s Local Artist in Residence Program provides Public Energy staff time and an artist’s fee to support creative work on new projects and career development.
Naomi Duvall
Photo: Bradley Boyle
Naomi Duvall is an actor, playwright, puppeteer and burlesque performer. She has been working on her craft since she graduated in 2012 from a 3-year professional theatre acting program at John Abbott College in Montreal. Her most recent work is the piece Dark Eyes, which she performed and recorded for 4th Line Theatre’s Festival of Light and Dark in February of this year. She has been making art in Peterborough for the past six years and has been involved in a variety of dance/theatre/puppetry shows. You may have recently seen her work in Public Energy Performing Arts’ Rewind Room in April-June of 2020.
Naomi will be developing Dark Eyes, a shadow puppet play detailing the love story of a woman and an extraterrestrial.
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Jennifer Elchuk (Opal)
Jennifer Elchuk (Opal) has been active in the Peterborough community as a multi-disciplinary artist since 2006. Her current focus is creating circus and multi-art performance. She coordinates the Peterborough Academy of Circus Arts(PACA), a non-profit organization dedicated to teaching and creating circus arts locally, which she has been actively involved with since it was founded in 2014. Her art has often explored themes of human connection to the natural landscape, as well as relationship between human bodies, largely through collaborative work.
During this residency Opal will explore a new way to rig the aerial canoe, a unique circus apparatus that she designed. She will explore themes related to the concept of Storm: Weathering and Waiting Out, as metaphor for two basic coping methods in times of challenge: resisting and accepting.
Nimkii Osawamick
Nimkii Osawamick (Odawa, Wikwemikong Unceeded Reserve, Wolf Clan) is a world renowned dance artist specializing in Hoop dance. His performance credits include the 2020 Juno Awards, the Digging Roots 2019-2020 World Tour, and international performances with cellist Cris Derksen. He performed as a dancer and a singer in Kaha:wi Dance Theatre’s The Honouring and TransMigration Tour. In 2019 he was named Outstanding Emerging Artist at the Peterborough Arts Awards.
Nimkii will be working on two projects during his residency: choreography for a new music video and a filmed documentary-drama about his recently deceased grandfather.
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Kate Story
Photo: Wayne Eardley
Kate is a genderqueer writer and theatre artist originally from Newfoundland, now living and working in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, Ontario. Kate has collaboratively devised over 30 dance/theatre performance works over the years including Performances May Be Permanent, damned be this transmigration, Insomnia, a place you’d go to find something, something that you’d left there, Unexploded Ordnance, and Festivus Rattus Rattus 2035!; projects have been presented in Peterborough, Toronto, and St. John’s. Kate is grateful to have worked with diverse theatre and dance artists including Christopher House, 4th Line Theatre, DNA Theatre, Caravan Stage Company, R. Murray Schafer, Bill James, Chartier Danse, The Nervous System, Ker Wells, Fleshy Thud, Ryan Kerr, and many others. In 2015 she received the Ontario Arts Foundation’s K.M. Hunter Artist Award for Theatre.
While in residence with PE, Kate will develop a new performance work Anxiety, exploring a new performative fiction about a war correspondent called home because her father – an internationally-renowned Beowulf scholar – is dying.
