We use this company as a vehicle to create work & help others effect change.
Executive Director
Michael Orlando is an arts and operations leader with multi-sectoral experience in the public and private sector. His life’s work has been driving transformational change through compassion, empathy and radical kindness.
He believes that individuals and organizations have a duty to ‘live their politics’, and has devoted himself to making both personal and systemic changes to the art and social service landscape. He has held executive roles in both sectors and has a proven track record of being able to deliver; whether it involves complex projects and budgets, leading large multidisciplinary teams, building relationships with trade unions, or working with not-for-profit Boards. Michael can move comfortably from the Boardroom to the Greenroom and understands the needs of social service structures and artistic folks.
He believes in radical kindness and creating healthy ecosystems, and that it is the responsibility of a leader to dedicate themselves and the organization they steward to do the work of decolonization, while approaching their responsibilities through an anti-oppressive and anti-racist lens. This work is not a weekend course or webinar – but rather the ongoing focus of any socially just organization.
As an artist he has worked extensively with both Canadian and International theatre and performance companies including: Theatre Passe Muraille, Factory Theatre, Crate Productions, Convergence Theatre, Volcano Theatre, Cahoots Theatre Projects, Unit 102 Theatre, 32 Teeth, VideoFag and Pandemic Theatre.
Michael’s work has been included in the Toronto International Fringe Festival, Edmonton Fringe Festival, Summerworks Theatre Festival, and the In the Soil Festival. He has created 15 works with Theatre Lab, which have been nominated for and won several awards including two Canadian Comedy Awards for it’s production of The Adventures of Tom Shadow.
Michael is a core member of The Wrecking Ball and is a graduate of the Humber Theatre conservatory program.
managing director
Sigrid Velis is an actor, producer and arts administrator. She has appeared in various independent productions in Toronto and in her hometown of London, Ontario, and has toured across the United States with Kid’s Entertainment/King Cole Theatrical’s production of Stellaluna.
For the past few years, Sigrid has been focusing on the administrative side of theatre. As Alameda Theatre Company’s Associate Producer and Administrator, Sigrid produced the 2011 SummerWorks production of The Intruder, Carmen Aguirre’s one woman show Chile Con Carne and three De Colores Festivals of New Works, and was the Associate Producer for Body Theatre’s Salome’s Clothes.
For Theatre Lab, Sigrid has produced You Can Sleep When You’re Dead, Centre of the Universe, First Sight and Dead End. Sigrid is a graduate of the Humber Theatre conservatory program and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University.
Past Resident Artists
Gaetz Photography
Lindsay Mullan
creator-in-Residence (2019-2020)
Lindsay Mullan is a Canadian Comedy Award Nominated actor, improvisor, instructor, and creator. She is an alumnus of the Second City Toronto Mainstage, an alumnus of the internationally-acclaimed improvisation theatre, Loose Moose, and a graduate of the Mount Royal University Theatre Arts Acting Program. As an artist Lindsay strives to create original and edgy new works that tickle the funny bone while pulling at the heart strings. This is why she is so thrilled to reintroduce and reinvent her burlesque variety show TEASE with the help of Theatre Lab in 2020.
Selected stage credits include: The Nutcracker Story Time (National Ballet Of Canada), Everything Is Great Again (Second City Toronto), Come What Mayhem! (Second City Toronto), Blind Date (Thousand Islands Playhouse & Hudson Village Theatre), Naughty Listers (Second City Toronto), Truth or Dare? (TDAD), Control (MMMC), The Penelopiad (Alberta Theatre Projects).
Selected Film & TV credits include: Loose Ends, My Spy (STX Entertainment), She Stoops To Conquer (LaRue Entertainment), and Try It! (Temple Street Productions).
To find out more about Lindsay and her work you can check out: www.lindsaymullan.com
Jonny Sun
Playwright-in-Residence (2016-2017)
Jonny Sun is an emerging Canadian playwright whose works have been performed at the Yale School of Drama, the Hart House Theatre in Toronto, and as part of Theatre Lab's FIRST SIGHT Performance Series. He is an advocate for interdisciplinary creative practice and works across the fields of theatre, music, visual and installation art, design research, architecture, engineering, new media, and comedy. He is currently a PhD candidate at MIT, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and a recipient of the MIT De Florez Fund for Humor.
His Twitter account @jonnysun, an ongoing character and comedy project, has over 310,000 followers to date and has been published in NPR, The Washington Post, The Independent, Vice, The Hollywood Reporter, Buzzfeed, Playboy, Cosmo, The Yale Herald, and was nominated for the 2015 Shorty Award for Comedian of the Year.
He holds a Master of Architecture from Yale and a Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto.