maker. director. performer. collaborator. producer. facilitator. guide. writer. ghost.
My practice is rooted in the ancient, living, breathing body—its capacity to perform, to transform, to merge with matter, to remember, and to disrupt. Through performance, I move through a constellation of themes, often shifting, contradicting, or colliding with each other. My work exists in the liminal spaces where theatre, ritual, and visual art overlap and unravel, inviting audiences into encounters where wonder brushes up against the weird.
I approach creation as an act of wandering—a deliberate drift through cultural codes, historical debris, personal memory, and collective imagination. My process is inherently hybrid and improvisational: I collage, re-mix, mash, and queer familiar forms, testing their limits and reconfiguring their meanings. I embrace strategies of unsettling and haunting to awaken new perceptions and possibilities. Playfulness and provocation are central to my practice.
Collaboration is essential to my work—not only with other artists, but with place, object, history, and the unseen. Each project emerges from a dialogue between intention and accident, structure and chaos. Ultimately, I aim to make the strange intimate and the intimate strange, crafting performances that leave room for mystery, multiplicity, and transformation.
Mia is the founder, organizing member, and co-producer of the ambitious Waking Death Arts & Culture Event Series that took place in Lethbridge (Canada) in the Fall of 2023. A showing of her new work in process The Late Night Ghost Show was presented as part of the series.
I was the co-artistic director (alongside Ian Mozdzen) of the notorious – out of line theatre – founded in Winnipeg, Canada (2003-2016). Our company created 10 original works, various shorter projects, and toured nationally. (Some of the best days of my life!)
Mia’s recent ventures include a return to ghost-work-hauntings appearing at the Young Lungs Dance Exchange 20th Anniversary (Winnipeg, 2025), directing the award-winning object theatre adaptation of Hrotsvitha’s Sapientia (New York 2023, Montreal 2019-2020, Lethbridge 2018, Winnipeg 2015), the Caryl Churchill inspired Destroy She Said (Edmonton 2014, Winnipeg 2018), the museum-tour-skewer Postcolonial Postcards (Dalnavert Museum, Winnipeg 2017), and performing & touring the Jean Genet-Madonna inspired White Bread (Edmonton, Antwerp, Munich, Innsbruck, Belgrade 2014-2016).
Mia is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts/Piiksinaasin at the University of Lethbridge.
contact: miavanleeuwen.ool@gmail.com
interests: theatre of images, performance art, postdramatic theatre, devised theatre, ritual, slavic folklore, performing objects, queer theory, decolonizing practices, death studies, thanatology, memento mori, ghosts, ghosting, research-creation, arts-based research, practice-led research, adaptation, all the viewpoints (Overlie, Bogart, Landau…), authentic movement, buoth, yoga, qigong, meditation, walking, contemplation, spectacle, photography, wunderkammers, peepshows, burlesque, tango, lip-sync, drag, pochinko clown, neo-bouffon, grand guignol, Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Madonna Ciccone, fandom, pop-culture, 80’s ballads, stand-up comedy, tarot, the ineffable, intuition, weirdness, altered states, effigies, dreams, collage, bricolage, assemblage, stream of consciousness … and love & kindness.
(2010)
contact: miavanleeuwen.ool@gmail.com
Mia Star van Leeuwen 