Episode 42: Cowboys, Mermaids, and Interdisciplinary Art — with Barbara Adler

About Our Guest

Barbara Adler

Her writing and music have been presented through multiple solo and band albums, theatre and dance productions and performances at major music and literary festivals. In her own work, Barbara is inspired by real life happenings that blur between authenticity and counterfeit, the wild and the cultivated. Her projects often combine speculative fiction, holiday-gothic imagery and field research –– she looks for masks in people and in the natural world. Since 2016, she has collaborated with artists Cole Schmidt and James Meger to program and produce Sawdust Collector, an interdisciplinary series presenting new, experimental and improvised performance. Her most recent project is Mermaid Spring, a sprawling work of music theatre tracing the connections between precarious human labour and environmental collapse, in creation with Kyla Gardiner/The Public Swoon. Barbara holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies and a BA in Art and Cultural Studies, both from Simon Fraser University. She is the Professional Development Coordinator at SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts. Somehow, she's a horse owner.