Deanna Yerichuk
Deanna has dedicated her academic and music career to community-engaged social change. As a performer, Deanna has worked as a singer-songwriter, conductor, and actor across Canada. As a community musician, she led the voice and choral department at Dixon Hall Music School (Toronto) for five years, and was a frequent guest conductor for Echo Women’s Choir (Toronto). Deanna also worked with Sing for Life (Edmonton) to pilot music classes for mothers in conflict with the law.
As a researcher, Deanna is Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, and her research focuses on historical and contemporary issues of inclusion and justice in participatory music. She is Principal Investigator on two projects: The Gahu Project, which used participatory action research methods to explore music and racial justice in high schools; and Community Music in Canada, which explores participatory music projects working towards social justice in community contexts across Canada. Deanna has a secondary focus on arts-based research methods, and is a co-investigator on the five-year research-creation project Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments (RISE), that integrates professional musicians and community members in collaborative opera development on the topic of future cataclysms.
Deanna currently coordinates the Community Music Bachelor of Music specialization at WLU, and is the research director of the Laurier Centre for Music in the Community.
Web site: www.yerichuk.com
Instagram: @LaurierCommunityMusic
