Team

Photo of Aryana Malekzadeh and collaborator during Entry Waves 2025 by Fran Chudnoff

CanAsian Dance is an interdisciplinary team grounded in collaboration, care, and shared artistic inquiry. Working across multiple dance forms, storytelling, production, and communication, the team is united by a commitment to how we create as much as what we create.The CAD team sees artistic practice as relational work, where listening, dialogue, and care are essential to sustaining both process and performance over time. This ethos supports a practice that evolves through collaboration and attention to how people gather and create together.

Our Team

Angie Cheng

Artistic Lead

  • Angie is a Montreal-based artist in contemporary dance. Collaborative creation processes ground her ongoing research in performance, investigating the liminal space between creative process and performance event. 

    The embodied and specific understandings that arise from these investigations shape her current questions and engagements both in her own work and with others. She supports the projects she is involved in through her practice of deep listening and feedback through gathering perspectives as a way to facilitate group conversations.

    She is also an advocate and has been actively engaged in the conversations of inclusivity, diversity and accessibility, as well as participating in, co-leading collective actions and activities.  It’s not just what we make as artists but how. She is committed to ongoing learning and practicing consent, respect and accessibility: care in how we are together in all that she is engaged in.

    (I am an artist in dance)

    I use “in dance” because I have and do wear many hats. 

    A practice I carry with me throughout is offering support through listening, observation, conversations, and questions. Reflecting back on what I hear and understand as feedback for deeper understanding, or to see what might be emerging. Unfinished, half thoughts, and ideas, mistakes and idea changes and clarifications are welcome.  Discussions around your artistic practice, interests, ethics, questions around how you may be working, the work itself, choreography, thoughts and ideas. I offer my support in figuring it out together. )

    On stage, Ganesh directed the Primetime Award-winning Toronto Fringe show My Korean Canadian Friend. His play Koli Kari premiered successfully at the 2024 Toronto Fringe, with a new piece set to debut at the 2025 Fringe.

Ganesh Thava

General Manager

  • Ganesh Thava is a Tamil-Canadian writer, director, producer, and storyteller. He trained at George Brown Theatre School and the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, holding a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing from TMU. Initially pursuing a career in advertising, he transitioned to arts administration and education, working with the York Region Arts Council, Workman Arts, Ògo Tàwa, and numerous municipalities to deliver creative entrepreneurship workshops for hundreds of artists.

Fran Chudnoff

Communications & Programs Associate

  • Fran Chudnoff also known as Francesca, Franz, Franny (they/them), is a non award winning millennial, with a BFA in performance, and paying rent as a multidisciplinary artist. They are a dance maker, reluctant video artist, photographer, and a true beginner at 3D modelling and digital illustration. Their work is in conversation with post-internet aesthetics, gender deviance, and shaping a “social aura” through aspirational imagery and the mundane. Fran embraces the complexity of millennial tropes by blending sincerity and cringe. Their most urgent project is to share as many meals with their Lola as possible, but you probably know them best from their work on @facerider

Karen Bennedsen

Book Keeper

Associate Artists

The Associate Artists are essential support in carrying forward and enriching CAD’s vision for this season’s programming. The team meets weekly to strategically plan and prepare for cultivating an open and inviting environment for our programmed artists. These Associate Artists contribute their insight, skills, and respective networks to aid in the selection of artists and engagement with relevant communities. Our current Associate artists are: Megumi Kokuba, Rachana Joshi, and Wai Liu

Associate Artist 25/26 Bios

  • Megumi Kokuba was born on the southernmost island of Japan, Okinawa. She studied ballet with joy from the age of two. After graduating from College in Okinawa, Megumi came across contemporary dance and was smitten. She moved to Toronto to train in dance and is a proud graduate of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre (now Dance Arts Institute). Megumi joined the company as a TD Dance Intern in 2012/2013, and she has had many inspiring creation and performance opportunities in Toronto ever since. As a dance artist, her main focus is to help the environment. Actions like listening, holding space and prioritizing active communication are at the forefront of her personal practice.

  • Rachana Joshi is an independent dance artist based in Tkaronto. She completed her Bharatanatyam arangetram under Lata Pada in 2017 and is a company dancer and teacher with Sampradaya Dance Creations, performing in productions such as Nirvana and the touring work, Kintsugi. A 2019 honours graduate of York University with a Dance BFA, she also trained in Limon and Graham techniques. She is a company dancer with Nova Dance, performing in company repertoire Decoded Dances (2024) and Svaha! (2023).

    Rachana has had opportunities to deepen her artistic inquiry through learning opportunities with Seeta Patel Dance, Padmini Chettur, Anandam Dance Theatre, Peggy Baker Dance Projects, and Smt. Priyadarshini Govind.

    Rachana is the artistic director of Kala Dance Collective, an organization committed to amplifying the voices of diasporic Bharatanatyam dancers. As a choreographer, she explores Bharatanatyam’s geometry, rhythm, and storytelling, reimagining ritual forms and mythology.

  • Wai Liu is a Hong Kong born movement artist based in Toronto. Their work grows from sensation, imagery, and lived experience. Blending contemporary, modern, and Asian movement forms, Wai creates pieces that feel grounded, intimate, and responsive to the environment. They work with contact, friction, and theatrical authenticity, often exploring how the body negotiates its own habits and histories. Their practice moves between studios, outdoor spaces, festivals, and collaborative residencies, where Wai creates work that invites people to slow down, listen, and reconnect. Their choreography brings together precision, curiosity, and cross cultural perspectives to form work that resonates with both physical and emotional presence.

Associate Artists 24/25 Bios

  • Megumi Kokuba was born on the southernmost island of Japan, Okinawa. She studied ballet with joy from the age of two. After graduating from College in Okinawa, Megumi came across contemporary dance and was smitten. She moved to Toronto to train in dance and is a proud graduate of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre (now Dance Arts Institute). Megumi joined the company as a TD Dance Intern in 2012/2013, and she has had many inspiring creation and performance opportunities in Toronto ever since. As a dance artist, her main focus is to help the environment. Actions like listening, holding space and prioritizing active communication are at the forefront of her personal practice.

  • Rachana Joshi is an independent dance artist based in Tkaronto. She completed her Bharatanatyam arangetram under Lata Pada in 2017 and is a company dancer and teacher with Sampradaya Dance Creations, performing in productions such as Nirvana and the touring work, Kintsugi. A 2019 honours graduate of York University with a Dance BFA, she also trained in Limon and Graham techniques. She is a company dancer with Nova Dance, performing in company repertoire Decoded Dances (2024) and Svaha! (2023).

    Rachana has had opportunities to deepen her artistic inquiry through learning opportunities with Seeta Patel Dance, Padmini Chettur, Anandam Dance Theatre, Peggy Baker Dance Projects, and Smt. Priyadarshini Govind.

    Rachana is the artistic director of Kala Dance Collective, an organization committed to amplifying the voices of diasporic Bharatanatyam dancers. As a choreographer, she explores Bharatanatyam’s geometry, rhythm, and storytelling, reimagining ritual forms and mythology.

  • Tanveer Alam began his Kathak training with Sudeshna Maulik and continued his nuanced studies with guru Sandhya Desai. He is a 2019 graduate of Western contemporary dance from the Dance Arts Institute of Canada (DAI).

    Alam has performed in works by Rina Singha, Lata Pada, Padmini Chettur, Brandy Leary, Harikishan S. Nair, Sashar Zarif, Lucy Rupert, and Peter Chin, to name a few. As an emerging choreographer, he has presented work at SummerWorks Festival, Battery Dance Festival+, MAI – Montréal, arts interculturels, CanAsian Dance Festival: Grit Short Dances, and Tangente. As an emerging curator, he has supported programming initiatives with Dancemakers, TOES FOR DANCE, and the Flemingdon Park Toronto Public Library.

    Throughout the 2024–25 season, Alam performed solo presentations at Vilaya Festival (Pittsburgh), The New York Kathak Festival (New York), and Navatman Black Box Baithak (New York). He was a commissioned choreographer for Sampradaya Dance Creations’ 35th anniversary work, Salaam Rahman, featuring A.R. Rahman’s oeuvre performed by the Mississauga Symphony Orchestra. Most recently, he premiered his collaborative work Ibaadat with co-choreographer Barkha Patel at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (Mumbai).

Board of Directors:

Ariana Shaw (President)
Linda Zhang
Katrina Medalle
Rob Abubo
Arrthami Siva-Kuruvinth
Revathy Kumar

Previous Staff:

Denise Fujiwara — Artistic Director Emerita
Candice Falby (General Manager 2024), Jasmine Au (Administrative Manager 2023-2024), Ariana Shaw (Managing Director 2022-2024), Gitanjali Kolanad (Artistic Associate - KickStart, 2022-2023), Mayumi Lashbrook (Co-Artistic Associate, To Be Danced, 2022), Michael Caldwell (Co-Artistic Associate, To Be Danced, 2022), Adina Herling (General Manager, 2001-2021)

CanAsian Dance is situated in Tkaronto, a Mohawk word meaning “the place in the water where the trees are standing.” It is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, and it continues to be the home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

This land is under the Dish with One Spoon covenant, an agreement between the Anishinaabeg and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. This land is a dish to be shared and cared for and we all share one spoon; the spoon is to be used to take only what is needed and to leave enough for others, thus ensuring a viable and abundant future. We recognize the enduring resilience of Indigenous peoples and we acknowledge that we are accountable to these relationships and these agreements. 

We carry these values of responsibility in sharing and caring in abundance with consideration of not only ourselves but of our communities that we share together.

Land Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the following funding partners for their ongoing support