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Naila Keleta-Mae
Naila Keleta-Mae performing in Toronto, Canada Naila Keleta-Mae performing in Toronto, Canada
Born	Naila Keleta Mae Belvett (1977-07-25) July 25, 1977 (age 46) Mississauga, Ontario
Occupation	Artist-Scholar

Naila Keleta-Mae

Naila Keleta-Mae (born Naila Keleta Mae Belvett) is an artist-scholar. Known for her charismatic versatility and gut-wrenching content, she mixes music, literature and theatre mainly as a performance poet, playwright, singer-songwriter and scholar. She has worked as an artist and/or scholar

. She is a lecturer in the Department of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo, was awarded the prestigious 2011 New Scholars Prize by the International Federation for Theatre Research, the Abella Scholarship for Studies in Equity from York University and the Susan Mann Dissertation Scholarship from York University, which she had to decline.

Early years

Naila Keleta-Mae was born Naila Keleta Mae Belvett on July 25 1977 in

. Naila’s mother and father, Gerald Belvett, chose the North African name Naila for its meaning, "one who succeeds," Keleta after her paternal grandmother and Mae after Naila’s mother. All throughout elementary and high school teachers and children had difficulty pronouncing her name so Naila would always write "nah-ee-lah" in parentheses beside it. From 1996 to 2005, Naila used the stage name Nah-ee-lah or her then legal name, Naila Belvett. In 2005, she changed her last name to Keleta Mae and later added the hyphen when Keleta was routinely mistaken for her middle name.

Artistic Work

Naila Keleta-Mae has performed spoken word at shows including The Nuyorican Poets Café, Luminato Festival, Scream in High Park, the International Dub Poetry Festival, Vibes Pon Di Corner, the Salvador Allende Arts Festival for Peace, The Yellow Door, Yawp, Zem Café, and the Honey Jam. She has written three produced plays “No Knowledge College,”[2] “stuck”^[3] and “yagayah” (co-written with d’bi.young) She has also released three full-length albums: “bloom” (2009), “free dome: south africa” (2002)and “free dome” (2001) and appeared in the films “What Is INDIE?: A Look Into the World of Independent Musicians” (Stand Alone Records, 2006) and “Frail” (A Show Thoze Fascists Productions, 2002). Her artistic philosophy is to create, develop and perform content that moves fluidly through aesthetics, disciplines and media while being relevant and healing in its interrogations of cultures of domination and their effects on people’s everyday lives.

File:Naila Keleta-Mae teaching at York University (3).jpg

Academic Career

Naila Keleta-Mae teaches in Department of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo. She is currently completing her dissertation, which examines black women’s identities as a type of perpetual performance. Her lived experiences in a black, female, heterosexualized, middle-classed, multilingual, able body in contemporary Canada have been profoundly informative and challenging. Within this context, her work as a artist-scholar contemplates, and creatively articulates, the politics and intersections of these cultural signifiers. Her current academic research interests include:

, USA (2009-2010). Select publications listed in the reference section below. [4] ^{[5] [6] [7]}

Teaching Philosophy

Naila Keleta-Mae’s teaching practice is a pedagogy of justice that uses divergent resource material to challenge participants students to identify and interrogate the historical, social, political and cultural components of their frameworks of analysis. Her pedagogy of justice pivots on the building of a co-constituted student-teacher relationship. “A co-constituted learning relationship requires constant experimentation with ways to rethink, reshape, and redistribute power. It also poses its own set of risks, particularly when negotiated within the encoded space of a western postsecondary classroom where divisions of power are so deeply entrenched that students and teacher perform their roles with the ease of a repertory company playing stock characters.”^[8]

Nonetheless, Keleta-Mae argues that within co-constituted learning relationships, students and teachers become more invested in their research and creative potential and more autonomous in their exhibition of intellectual and artistic agency.

File:Naila Keleta Mae afro.jpg

Education

• PhD,
  Theatre Studies, York University
  , 2012 (expected)
• Graduate Diploma, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, York University, 2012 (expected)
• Dissertation: Female and Black in Canada
• Magisteriate of Fine Arts, Theatre, York University, 2005
• Concordia University
  , 2000
• Certificate of Bilingualism (English and French), The Scarborough Board of Education, 1996

Select Scholarships, Research Grants and Artistic Awards

• 2011-2013 Co-Applicant with Principal Investigator Andrea Davis. “Youth and community development in Canada and Jamaica: A transnational approach to youth violence” Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Partnership Development Grant
• 2011 New Scholars’ Prize, International Federation for Theatre Research
• 2011 Abella Scholarship for Studies in Equity, York University
• 2011 Susan Mann Dissertation Scholarship, York University, (Declined)
• 2008 to 2011, Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Doctoral Scholarship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
• 2007, Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Doctoral Scholarship
• 2007, York Graduate Scholarship, York University
• 2002, Best Spoken Word Recording Award, Urban Music Association of Canada
• 2001, NoiseMakers Award, Montreal Mirror
• 2000, Montreal Mayor’s Award, Fondation du Maire de Montréal

Publications & References

External Links

• Naila Keleta-Mae official website
• Professor's profile at University of Waterloo
• PhD Student profile at York University
• Naila Keleta-Mae on Las Perlas del Mar News