Kimberly Skye Richards
Wall Associate
Kimberly Skye Richards (she/her) is a settler scholar and dramaturg who engages performance as a vehicle for resisting extractivism, inspiring just transitions, and moving through impasses. She obtained a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California-Berkeley in 2019, and she was a 2021 Public Energy Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Transition in Energy, Culture, and Society at University of Alberta. She is currently teaching in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia. Her recent dramaturgical work focuses on climate grief and transition anxiety. She is on the Mission Circle of SCALE, the Board of Directors for the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, and has been part of the first Artist Brigade cohort convened by The Only Animal. Sustainable Tools for a Just Transition – Hemispheric Encounters.
Primary Recipient Awards
During this residency, the 12 catalyst artists, who are active in the arts sector in Canada and internationally, will collaboratively reflect on how art can help us to “stay with the trouble” and face the complexities of our current times: to not turn our back to the turmoil of difficult things, while remaining grounded and attentive to what it means to be human within a wider web of relations.
Drawing from their multi-disciplinary practices which include theatre, puppetry, dance, music, clowning and visual arts, the artists are working on how to activate different modes of feeling, thinking, relating and acting as forces of social change that may open up not-yet-imaginable possibilities for co-existence in the future.
Project: Sustainable Tools for Just Transitions
An open-access archive of performance-based strategies to promote and mobilize support for a just transition away from petro-modernity that prioritizes the experiences of those most impacted by the violence of the existing system. From performance artists developing exercises to guide communities out of denial and fear of our extremely limited carbon budget, to art activists using theatrical tactics to dismantle the apparatus that fuels our current petro-cultures.
