Tara Goldstein

Tara Goldstein is the Founder and current Co-Artistic Director of Gailey Road Productions. She graduated from the MFA Playwriting Program at Spalding University, Louisville, Kentucky, in November 2006.

Tara is also a professor, researcher and playwright in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her current teaching and research program focuses on gender, sexuality and schooling; archival research and verbatim theatre. The findings from her recent research project The Experiences of LGBTQ Families in Ontario Schools funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council from 2016-2020 are shared on her website www.lgbtqfamiliesspeakout.ca and in her books Teaching Gender and Sexuality at School: Letters to Teachers (Routledge/Taylor and Francis, 2019) and Our Children are Your Students: LGBTQ Students Speak Out (Myers Education Press, 2021).

Tara’s recent verbatim play Out at School, co-written with Jenny Salisbury and Pam Baer and published under the title This is Our Family in her book Our Children Are Your Students, is a multi-media verbatim theatre piece based on interviews with LGBTQ families about their experiences at elementary and high school. It was also performed at the L Fest in Llandudno, Wales in 2018 and then in Toronto at the Pride Festival in June 2019.

Out at School, the Audio Play, was recorded on Zoom in November 2020 and is available on popular podcast platforms.

Tara’s latest arts-based archival research projects are The Love Booth and Companion Plays and a novel called Home of Her Heart.

The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays feature seven plays about queer activism in the 1970 and 1980s. The plays will be performed at Toronto Pride in June 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of homosexuality being taken out of the American Psychology Association (APA)’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) in 1973.

Home of Her Heart published in May 2023 features a story about a young woman adopted from Colombia at age 10 and her adoptive grandmother who fled her home in Nazi Germany through the Kindertransport program at the age of 16. Spanning borders from Colombia to Canada, Germany to England, a grandmother and her granddaughter, both survivors of state violence, search for family and a place to call home.

Teaching Writers Speak
By Toronto Writing Project

Teaching Writers Speak is for educators, researchers, and creative folks like us who view writing as a vehicle for change, both in our institutions and in the world at large. We chat with teachers, professors, community educators, and researchers to better support one another as teachers of writing, our students as writers, and our work as scholars in the field of critical literacy. Teaching Writers Speak is a podcast produced by members of the Toronto Writing Project (www.torontowritingproject.com).

Listen to the interview with Tara Goldstein about her research-based theatre work. ↓