Donovan King is a professional actor, teacher, historian, and tour guide from Montreal, Quebec. As the founder of Haunted Montreal, a company that researches ghost stories and offers haunted tours, King hires professional actors to lead the tours and publishes a new ghost story every month on the Haunted Montreal Blog. King is also a performance activist and experimental theatre artist who juggles acting, teaching, directing, dramaturgy, and theory to create dramatic projects that challenge systemic oppression. Known for his commitment to education and community, King assisted with the establishment of the Montreal Fringe Festival in 1991, is the author of Doing Theatre in Montreal and he set up the Montreal Infringement Festival in 2004.
King holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Theatre Studies from the University of Calgary, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama in Education from Concordia University, a Bachelor of Education from McGill University and a Diplome d’Études Collegiales in Acting from John Abbott College. He is the author of Optative Theatre: A Critical Theory, and he facilitates various activist campaigns and drama classes in Montreal. He has been known to collaborate with other theatre activists internationally such as Augusto Boal, Andrew Boyd of the Billionaires for Bush, Reverend Billy, Stephen Duncombe, Larry Bogad, Kathryn Blume, Kurt Schneiderman, Jason C. McLean, Gary St. Laurent, and many others.
As the co-founder of the Optative Theatrical Laboratories (OTL) King strives to revitalise theatre as an agent for social change through experimental practice, critical theory, and sustained performance. The OTL designs interconnected theatrical campaigns such as Car Stories, that target instances of oppression, and employs a diversity of cutting-edge activist performance techniques: culture-jamming, Viral Theatre, Sousveillance Theatre, meme-warfare, Electronic Disturbance Theater, and Global Invisible Theatre, to name a few.