Charity Marsh
Contact Info
About Charity
Dr. Charity Marsh 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, queer musicking, performance and activism in community arts programming. Currently, Marsh is leading, Take Up Space, You Matter!, a project funded by Mental Health Research Canada and the Saskatchewan Health Foundation which focuses on fostering (re)connection after the pandemic through trauma-informed community arts programming.
Director of the University of Regina’s Humanities Research Institute (HRI), Dr. Marsh is a Full Professor in Creative Technologies and Interdisciplinary Programs, and Coordinator of the Creative Technologies and new Design programs 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 (formerly Girls Rock Regina) 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, community radio, and the impacts of community arts-based initiatives on expanding possibilities for women, trans, and non-binary people within the popular 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.
In March 2020, Dr Marsh produced and co-hosted with her young children the weekly children’s radio program, Imagine This Music!. 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 video art piece, 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, and a coordinator for the new research node, Listening to Music and Musicians, which is part of the Listening to Change Project, led by Dr. Ellen Waterman (Carleton) and Dr. Rebecca Caines (York).
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.