Amelia Sargisson (she/her) is a co-founder of and facilitator for Ground Floor. She’s also an actor, writer, and “theatre monster” (to quote Moscovitch/Beaty/ Kerr). 

Amelia first heard Carrie Fisher’s ringing words - “take your broken heart and make it into art” - in January 2017, when Meryl Streep quoted them at the Golden Globes. She remembers thinking (as did many, surely): “what a great banner for this new year!” In the years to come, however, Amelia would start to hear a new resonance in these words, as she became more and more aware of hearts breaking in the very process of making the art that could have been their solace and their salve. In January 2021, when she heard Alexis wonder out loud in a zoom meeting why so many artists get hurt making work that’s meant to heal, she was drawn in like a magnet, as were Tahirih, Dave and Richard, all pondering their own versions of that very question. They began talking, communing, reading, researching -- what tools could empower artists to healthily navigate the vulnerabilities of the job as well as co-create collaborative spaces where authenticity, compassion, and radical curiosity genuinely thrive? They took their findings and made them into ARCS. 

Today, Amelia continues to work with the Ground Floor team to make their programs as robust and practical as they can be, and loves facilitating them in professional and academic settings alike. She has completed Kristin Neff’s workshop in Fierce Self-Compassion (the more agentive sister of tender self-compassion) through the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, as well as Wishpath Healing's 6-week workshop in Polyvagal-Informed Approach to Health & Wellbeing.

Amelia has performed in English and French on stages across the country, from North Van to Halifax, as well as in the States and as far as Japan. Favourite theatre credits include: Red Velvet (Dora nomination), The Watershed, and Seeds (Crow’s); Paradise Lost, The Front Page, The Comedy of Errors, and Hamlet 911 (Stratford); All I Want For Christmas, Paradise Lost (META nomination), The 39 Steps (META nomination), and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Centaur); La Bête and Amadeus (Talk Is Free); Twelfth Night and King Lear (Canadian Stage); If We Were Birds (META nomination) and down from heaven (Cartes Premières Award for Best Actress) (Imago); Tender Napalm, The Innocents, and The Art of Catching Pigeons by Torchlight (Spotlight Award) (Summerworks); and six seasons of Shakespeare-in-the-Park (Repercussion). TV credits include: The Boys (Amazon Prime), See (Apple TV+) and Murdoch Mysteries (CBC). Amelia has narrated multiple audiobooks for Penguin Random House and works regularly as a mentoring artist at the National Theatre School. She is working on a solo show called Fer Shame, and her play, 30 People Watching, which she co-wrote with nisha ahuja, is published in ReView: an anthology of plays committed to social justice (Sense Publishers), which was nominated for the 2017 Canadian Association of Theatre Research Patrick O'Neill Award.