Paul Couillard is a queer performance artist, curator, and scholar. He has developed well over 300 performances in 26 countries, often working with his partner Ed Johnson. Their ongoing Duorama series explores notions of relationship—to each other, to the surrounding environment, and to audiences. Paul's solo work acts to build community and address trauma through responsive, durational explorations of our bodies as shared vessels of sensation, experience, knowledge, and spirit. His work considers the leaky borders of our entwined existences, searching for ways to convey complex layers of situated, personal histories and cultural specificities. Paul was the Performance Art Curator for the Toronto-based artist-run centre Fado from its inception in 1993 until 2007, and he is also a founding co-curator of Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC), the organizers of the biennial 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art. He is the editor of Canadian Performance Art Legends, a series of books on senior Canadian performance artists, including Margaret Dragu, Tanya Mars and Alain-Martin Richard. He has been a lecturer at McMaster University and the University of Toronto Scarborough. He holds a doctorate from York University in Communication and Culture. His dissertation, Rethinking Presence with a Thinking Body: Intra-active Relationality and Animate Form, investigates the role of presence in enabling shared meaningfulness. The text integrates insights from phenomenology, neuroscience and performance art to untangle the human tendency to treat body and consciousness as distinct and mutually alien entities. Paul's current research-creation methodologies combine performance art practice, curation, and conservation with close readings of scholarly texts. His most recent work is focused on the tactile-kinaesthetic experience of being a thinking body (espcially the ongoing curatorial series KinesTHESES), and exploring the materiality of animateness framed as gesture (Manifest Gestures, the forthcoming retrospective examination of the work of Canadian art duo Randy & Berenicci).