Narrative Battlefields: Information, Creativity, and the Cultural Front

Guests are warmly invited to join us on Friday, May 1, for an evening at Massey College presented by the Massey Arts Society. Doors open at 5:30 p.m., with the panel discussion from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m., followed by a question period and cocktail reception from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. in the Massey College Junior Common Room.

The war in Ukraine has also been a war of narratives. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, disinformation has shaped global perceptions, while Ukrainian artists, historians, and journalists have worked to preserve culture, memory, and truth. As Volodymyr Zelenskyy reminded cultural workers in 2024, their voices help carry a nation’s experience forward.

As the conflict reverberates globally, questions of meaning persist: Who tells the story? How is history made—and remade? And what role can the arts play in wartime?

The Massey Arts Society’s Narrative Battlefields panel brings together a playwright, journalist, and historian to examine storytelling on the cultural front—from misinformation to historical memory. Presented alongside Senior Fellow Andrew Kushnir’s play The Division at Crow’s Theatre (April 21–May 10, 2026), the discussion explores how confronting the past helps us understand the present.

Tickets for The Division at Crow’s Theatre available for purchase here: The Division | Crow’s Theatre

This panel is open to the Massey College community—including Junior and Senior Fellows—and to the wider public, with invited guests from Ukrainian community organizations, non-profits, arts organizations, journalists and members of the media, and a range of academic departments across the University of Toronto. Their diverse perspectives will continue to enrich the discussion during the cocktail reception that follows, bringing together scholars, practitioners, and community partners in the spirit The Massey College Arts Society.

Panelists:

Marci Shore is a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe and Professor at the Munk
School, currently on leave from her position as Professor of History at Yale University. Educated at Stanford University and the University of Toronto, she has taught at Indiana University and held fellowships at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Shore is the author of Caviar and Ashes, The Taste of Ashes, and The Ukrainian Night, and her essays have appeared in leading publications including The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, and The New York Review of Books. Her work explores the intellectual history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Central and Eastern Europe, examining how ideas, memory, and lived experience shape political and cultural life.

Andrew Kushnir is a multi-award-winning director, playwright, teacher, and activist based in Toronto. He is the artistic director of Project: Humanity, a leading developer of verbatim theatre in Canada. Among his produced plays are The Middle Place, Small Axe, Towards Youth, Wormwood, and The Gay Heritage Project. His direction of Bad Roads by Natal’ya Vorozhbit earned him both the 2023 Dora Award and Toronto Theatre Critics’ Award for outstanding direction. Kushnir is the writer and host of the limited series podcasts This Is Something Else and newly released Kultura Rising (looking at Ukrainian-Canadian arts and culture in wartime).He is a Loran Scholar, a Senior Fellow at Massey College, and founder of We Support LGBTQ Ukraine (lgbtukrainesupport.com). In 2023, the Globe and Mail named Kushnir one of 10 “Canadian Artists of the Year” and in January 2026, due to his work on the cultural front, he joined the list of Canadians officially sanctioned by the Russian Federation

Christian Borys is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker based in Ukraine and Poland. He has covered the war in Ukraine for the last two years and worked with VICE News, VICE Sports, Motherboard, Macleans Magazine, The Walrus The Guardian, Al Jazeera, the United Nations, Global Television, Huffington Post and many others.

Photographer Dahlia Katz. A photo of the timepiece by Andrew Kushnir’s grandfather.