CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY FREE CONCERT SERIES

Justin Peck is a three-time Tony Award winning director, choreographer, filmmaker, and dancer based in New York City. He is the Resident Choreographer of the New York City Ballet, and only the second person in the institution’s 75-year history to hold this title. He has developed and created over 50 stage and theater works that have been presented on stages around the world, including Lincoln Center, the Palais Garnier, Sydney Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Broadway: (with Buena Vista Social Club, Illinoise, and Carousel). He choreographed the 2021 film West Side Story in collaboration with director Steven Spielberg.

His creations for the dance world have been performed by companies all over the world, including the Paris Opera Ballet, Australian Ballet, Dresden Semperoper Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, Boston Ballet, Juilliard, The National Ballet of Canada, Miami City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, LA Dance Project, Dutch National Ballet, the School of American Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, and Houston Ballet among many others.

Carmen Romero is one of Canada’s most distinctive flamenco artists—an award-winning choreographer, performer, curator, educator, and cultural innovator whose work expands flamenco far beyond convention. Based in Toronto, she has spent more than three decades building a powerful artistic voice rooted in Spanish tradition while pushing the form into contemporary performance, theatrical staging, live music collaboration, and cross-cultural dialogue.

Through Compañía Carmen Romero, she creates work that few artists in Canada are attempting: flamenco as a living, evolving theatrical force where percussive footwork, castanets, song, rhythm, gesture, and dramatic imagery become a complete world on stage. Nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Choreography and recipient of the Muriel Sherrin Award for International Achievement in Dance, Romero has coached and choreographed for an extraordinary range of artists, including Shakira, The National Ballet of Canada, actors, competitive dancers, and vocal artists seeking the power, precision, and presence of flamenco.

Robert Binet is Artistic Director & Co-CEO of Fall for Dance North, as well as a choreographer who has created works for The National Ballet of Canada, The Royal Ballet, The New York City Ballet and more. Binet trained at Canada’s National Ballet School and spent 11 years with The National Ballet of Canada, beginning as Choreographic Associate and later appointed Director of Artist Development Programmes. He established the NBoC Creative Action program which offers choreographic development opportunities to Canadian choreographers and shares resources with the local dance community. In 2023, Binet was the Choreographic Mentor at the Venice Biennale College Danza and guest curator for the Dance: Made in Canada festival. In the same year, Binet received the Sandra Faire Next Generation Award from Dance Collection Danse, awarded to an individual under 40 who is making a significant impact on dance in Canada.

Dr. Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at OISE, University of Toronto. All of her work is grounded in her experience as a blind woman guided by a desire to show how blindness, specifically, and disability more broadly, can be understood as offering an alternate form of perception and is thus, a valuable and creative way of experiencing and knowing the world. She is the author of Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan). Devon is an award-winning actor and the co-founder of Peripheral Theatre. Her first play, Rainbow on Mars (Outside the March/The National Ballet of Canada/Peripheral Theatre) premiered August 2025 in Toronto. Her work exploring blind perception has been featured by The Royal Ballet (UK), the Queensland Ballet (Australia), Vienna State Opera (Austria), and The National Ballet of Canada.