TEACHER

Tom Bentley-Fisher is an award winning theatre director, teacher, and writer. He’s been the artistic director of five professional theatres, directed over one hundred productions across Canada,Catalonia, and the U.S, and taught his approach to movement and acting in universities, theatre schools, and studios throughout North America and Europe. He began his career as an actor, training in New York and London with Sanford Meisner and Yat Malmgren, and then performed in London’s West End before turning his hand to teaching and directing.

Gaining a strong reputation for developing and directing evocative world premieres, he has debuted the original work of some of Canada’s finest playwrights, as well as staging the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel’s The Oldest Profession. His productions have been featured at the acclaimed Festival Grec de Barcelona, including his 2016, multi-lingual international co-production of Burning Vision, incorporating film, dance and original music. He has also been featured at the Festival Teatre Clásico de Mérida in Spain, directing his all female version of The Iliad.

Tom is the producing founder of the Saskatoon International Fringe Festival in Saskatoon, The Carlton Way Theatre Festival, co-producing and touring Canadian plays, Connexio Canadenca,  an exchange project of translated plays between Canada and Catalonia, and the Global Age Project at Aurora Theatre in Berkeley. He was also the recipient of an ArtsBoard Grant to travel throughout Europe and Asia to view new forms of theatre and dance presentation. 

His novel, The Boy Who Was Saved By Jazz, has just been published by NeWest Press, and he is currently working on The Naked Reveal, a book about the Yat work and acting.

TEACHER

Pamela trained as a teenager in Australia with Yat Teacher Tim Robins who went on to teach at The Drama Centre, London for many years. In that early training, she was also introduced to the work of Cicely Berry, the RSC voice teacher. Since that time Pamela has trained in and taught many acting, breath and voice methods. She is a seeker of authentic experience and the numinous.

Pamela is a versatile theater-maker, working as a director, dramaturg, educator, actor, deviser and writer, depending on the project. She is proudly associated with two Bay Area activist theaters: 3Girls Theatre, and Aviva Arts (formerly foolsFURY). She was the Board Chair (2013-2021), as well as an ensemble member (2018-2022) of foolsFURY Theater and the former Artistic Managing Director of both The Yat/Bentley Centre for Performance, SF Bay Area, and Soup Kitchen Theatre, Melbourne, Australia.

She was the dramaturg for foolsFURY on (dis)Place[d] by Debórah Eliezer and Dionysus Was Such a Nice Man by Kate Tarker and has directed and been dramaturg on numerous plays in development at 3Girls Theatre and elsewhere. She has directed many plays, including the Australian premiere of Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang.

They trained in Theatre Direction at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) among whose distinguished alums are Cate Blanchett, Sarah Snook, and Baz Luhrmann. They studied Nature Awareness and Relational Education through Weaving Earth, and is a certified Celebrant & Ceremonialist of the Healing Arts. She has strong interests in group process, peacemaking, ritual and storytelling in all its forms.

Pamela brings a holistic sense of body / energy / mind / spirit to working with students and provides students with tools toward wholeness for themselves and their performance work.

TEACHER

Miranda trained in New York and Los Angeles in the Meisner Technique and has worked as an actress in Canada, the US, and Europe. She comes to the YBC work as a teacher with great respect for the inner life of the artist, helping them discover the truth of their inner resources and how to trust themselves in the creative process. Growing up immersed in this work, it has shaped her perception and understanding since she was very young.

Miranda’s artistic practice is about feeling oneself beneath the constructs, contractions, and habitual patterns that we mistake for who we are. She works within the belief that the artist must feel fully alive — available, sensitized inside and out, connected to essence — with authentic feeling, thought, sensation, and impulse. 

Her intention is to nurture a deep reverence for the intelligence of the life force moving through us — for the innate beauty of our humanity and the co-creative nature of existence. 

Miranda asks the questions: 
Can we return to our own nature — to the creative impulse that is attuned, alive, and feeling? 

Can we move from wearing a character to revealing one through the richness of our humanity.

Can we move past being merely realistic to being deeply honest, fully human?

Can we return to our own nature — to the creative impulse that is attuned, alive, and feeling?

TRANSLATOR

Elisabet Ràfols has been a literary translator since the early nineties. Her mix of languages is Catalan, Spanish, French, English and Italian. Her first collaborative theatre translation was in 1997 with Governor General award winner Anne Szumigalski, for Vindication of Senyora Clito Mestres by Montserrat Roig.

She is a founding member and artistic and executive director of Tant per Tant, a professional theatre company dedicated mainly to translation and intercultural artistic exchange from a feminist standpoint. She shared the role of artistic director in Tant per Tant with Tom Bentley-Fisher between 2008 and 2016, a time of impressive growth for the company, that culminated with the international production, with a mix cast of Canadian and Catalan actors, of Marie Clements’ play Visió ardent presented at the International Barcelona Grec Festival. During these years they collaborated closely delivering training workshops, where Elisabet was the main communicator in Catalan of Tom’s knowledge.

Her most recent theatre cotranslation from Catalan into French, Libert by Gemma Brió, premiered in March 2025 at Theatre La Licorne, in Montreal. This same year her translation Llums, llums, llums by Evelyne de la Chenelière, produced by Q-Ars Teatre, was presented at Sala Beckett in Barcelona.