esi callender

Theatre Artist

esi callender is a Black feminist theatre artist based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Their playwriting tends to deal with family histories, race, sexuality, consequence, and play, and their practice explores collaboration as a tool in resistance to racial capitalism. esi co-founded the process-oriented theatre collective Sort Of Productions and documented its evolving practices in their chapter “ineffable dramaturgies: experiments in Black queer and trans liberation,” in Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023). They have a masters in African Studies and won the 2024 Young Scholar Award from the Association for African Studies in Germany for their thesis on collaboration and solidarity between Black artists of diverging backgrounds at the perforcraZe International Artist Residency, a key space in the fight for queer and trans freedom in Ghana. esi recently returned to the stage in the workshop production of Wine & Halva by Deniz Başar, and is the dramaturg for playwright Banafsheh Hassani’s Regarding Antigone, currently in residence with Infinithéâtre.