Charity Marsh
Contact Info
Dr. Charity Marsh (she/her) is a settler community-engaged researcher, multidisciplinary artist, collaborator, and scholar living in Treaty 4. A former Tier II Canada Research Chair in Interactive Media and Popular Music, Dr. Marsh is internationally recognized for her research on hip hop cultures, popular music, gender and technology, media arts, and performance and activism in community arts programming.
Currently, Marsh is leading three funded research projects: In April 2024 Marsh was awarded a SSHRC Insight Grant for the project, Feminist Activism, Community Building, and Social Justice: Considering the Interventions and Impacts of Girls Rock Camps in Canada; It’s More Than A Name Change!: Re-Thinking the Culture and Priorities of GRR (formerly Girls Rock Regina), funded through the SSHRC Partnership Engagement program; and Take Up Space, You Matter!: Fostering (Re)Connection During and After the Pandemic Through Trauma-Informed Community Arts Programming. This is a collaborative project with community partners, GRR, Vibes YQR, and Femmes Across the Board, funded by Mental Health Research Canada and the Saskatchewan Health Foundation.
Director of the University of Regina’s Humanities Research Institute (HRI), Dr. Marsh is Professor and Program Coordinator of Creative Technologies and Design in the Faculty of Media, Art, & Performance. She is also director of the Interactive Media and Performance (IMP) Lab, which she founded in 2007 during her tenure as a Canada Research Chair.
Within the IMP Labs’ programming, Marsh produces and facilitates workshops on interactive audio and digital technologies; curates the Flatland Scratch Seminar and Workshop Series; engages in collaborative hip hop and interactive media projects with various partners; hosts the annual GRR youth and adult camps and programs; she has collaborated on developing sustainable supports for remote communities focusing on hip hop and arts programming; and she offers accessible, interactive community programming in the IMP Labs.
Marsh’s scholarly and creative practice focuses on Hip Hop and DJ cultures in Canada, gender, ageing and popular music, interactive media and performance, digital storytelling and community radio, and the impacts of community arts-based initiatives on expanding possibilities for children, women, non-binary people, and gender expansive people within the music industries.
Marsh is co-editor of We Still Here: Hip Hop North of the 49th Parallel (McGill-Queen’s), producer of Let’s Talk Research, a podcast series focusing on research supported by the Humanities Research Institute, and director of the documentary, I’m Gonna Play Loud: Girls Rock Regina and the Ripple Effect, which won Best Short Documentary and Audience Choice Awards at the Toronto Short Film Festival in 2021.
From March 2020 through 2021, Dr Marsh and her two young children produced and co-hosted Imagine This Music!, a weekly radio program for kids and their caregivers. From the radio program and in response to the voting down of the Pride Celebrations motion by the Regina Public School Board in Fall 2019, Marsh co-created the mixed media artwork, We are a Family, (with Evie Johnny Ruddy), as part of the Queering the Creek Augmented Reality exhibition (2020); and in August 2021, Marsh and Ruddy created the 12 minute audio composition called Imagine This, reflecting on making radio with children during the pandemic, which debuted at the international IF Festival.
Marsh is a long time researcher of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, is a co-pi on the SSHRC Partnership Grant Improvising Futures. Recently she has also taken on the Co-Directorship of the Regina Improvisation Studies Center (RISC), the Regina site for IICSI.
Marsh holds a PhD in Popular Music and Ethnomusicology and MA in Women’s and Gender Studies from York University, and a Bachelor of Music and BA in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of Ottawa.