We created the Creativity Everything Connection Fellowships program to support brilliant creators in the Toronto area. There are currently seven Fellows and we are highlighting them one-by-one in these profiles.
Jordan M. Burns (they/he) is a creator who specializes in traditional and devised contemporary theatre. They hold many talents in the industry such as playwright, writer, director, actor, vocal coach apprentice, and puppeteer. Over the past two years, Jordan has written four plays, producing and staging three of them. As a disabled Indigenous artist, Jordan’s primary goal in the arts is to further their experience as a playwright who creates and devises inclusive works for underrepresented communities.
Moving forward with their creative practice, Jordan hopes to be a vocal coach for theatre productions across Canada. They have begun to work toward this through independent study and through continued correspondence with one of their mentors, Paul de Jong, the head of coaching at the Stratford Festival. Jordan is driven to pursue the career of vocal coaching to eradicate the Western preconceptions of the ‘proper voice’.
Jordan brings the often unheard perspective of an Indigenous artist with a disability. They hope to expand peoples’ views surrounding the term “disability” and produce work that supports folx with non-visible disabilities as much as possible. Jordan looks forward to bouncing ideas off of others and learning about creative practices from other artistic industries from the Connection Fellowship community.