SHAWN DESOUZA-COELHO is an actor, scholar, author, magician, and stage manager of colour. Throughout his fifteen-year professional career he has acted across Canada with such companies as MT Space, Tottering Biped Theatre, Canadian Stage, and the Stratford Festival. Shawn’s written work has been presented at the SummerWorks Festival, toured nationally, and he has also authored two books, one of which is the first creative non-fiction biography of a theatrical stage manager ever published (Whenever You’re Ready, 2018, ECW Press). Throughout Shawn’s theatrical education/career, he has existed squarely within the Canadian theatre industry’s Western colonial framework, a framework that has determined the limits of his brown, Indo-Guyanese world. His career is now focused on breaking free of and dismantling those limits for himself and those like him. His SSHRC-funded PhD work (York University) will be an original phenomenological account of how racialized performers negotiate theatrical hegemonic space within the Southern Ontario theatre industry. Shawn aims to use his research to inform Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity and Decolonization policy changes related to safety within the Canadian theatre industry broadly. Pursuant to this, Shawn is also a member of the Governance Committee and Co-Convener of the Student Caucus of Staging Better Futures/Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs, a cross-Canada, cross-sectoral, multilingual partnership that responds directly and explicitly to decades of public calls for action against colonialism, racism, cis-male-hetero-centrism, ableism, and linguistic majoritarianism in post-secondary theatre education. The bone-deep systemic change Canadian theatre requires is now the gravitational center of his work.