Maiko Yamamoto - Teaching Acting

Maiko is a Vancouver-based artist who creates new, experimental and intercultural works of performance. Many of these works are built through a career-long practice of collaboration and include many theatre projects, public art works, and performance installations.

Maiko is the Artistic Director of Vancouver’s Theatre Replacement, which she co-founded in 2003 with fellow artist James Long. A leader in the Vancouver and national arts scenes, and well known internationally for her work, Maiko’s practice draws upon her love of formal inventiveness and exploration, conceptual play, creative research, artist-centred processes and experimental and multidisciplinary practice. A natural mentor, Yamamoto often collaborates with intergenerational artists, individuals and family members in making work that searches for playful, immediate and authentic ways of bringing audiences and performances together.

For TR she has created over 25 new works, many of which have toured to festivals and venues around the world, such as the Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver), Magnetic North Theatre Festival (Ottawa, Whitehorse), Everybody’s Spectacular (Reykjavik), PAZZ Performing Arts Festival (Oldenburg, Germany), Dublin Fringe Festival (Dublin) and artsdepot (London). Works include: BIOBOXES: Artifacting Human Experience, Yu-Fo, Train, Sexual Practices of the Japanese, Dress me up in your love, Town Choir, MINE and Best Life. She also curates the PushOFF platform, an annual festival that amplifies diverse artists creating cutting-edge, experimental work as part of a global conversation of art making. In 2018, Maiko started a new project-based artist residency called COLLIDER, which has had significant impact for Vancouver artists— to date the residency has fostered the creation of 5 bold new performance works which have gone on to make connections nationally and internationally.

In addition, Maiko teaches performance and mentors artists for a range of different companies, organizations and individuals, both in Canada and abroad. She has helped artists to develop new work through programs like MAKE, a residency initiative spearheaded by 4 arts organizations in Ireland; the National Theatre School of Canada’s Acting and Directing Programs; Bristol-based Action Hero’s You Can Be My Wingman residency; Arctic Arts Festival’s Open Call mentoring program, and why not theatre’s ThisGen Fellowship. She also occasionally works as a curator for other institutions and organizations, and writes and speaks about performance regularly, centred around devised theatre making and its capacity to transform systems and structures within the contemporary art field.

She holds a BFA in Theatre from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts and a Masters of Applied Arts in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Maiko was the co-recipient of the 2019 Siminovitch Prize in Directing, with James Long.