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We Get It: Marla Brennan on imagination and cancer (season 3, episode 12)

In the final episode of season three, Alex speaks with Marla Brennan as she shares her insight and experience on an abstract concept: imagination!

A performing artist her whole life, Marla combined her love of acting, theatre, singing, and juggling to curate Imagination Meets Cancer. She shares the background of this project, along with her cancer experience and her goals in the future.

Marla identifies as a white Maltese-Irish Canadian woman who has a passion for the expressive arts such as acting, spoken-word poetry, songwriting, puppetry, and juggling.

In 2020, she was living in Los Angeles and shifting to performing and teaching online after the onset of the pandemic when she experienced a medical emergency which resulted in a stage 3 ovarian cancer diagnosis.

“I quickly returned home to Canada, surrendered my fertility via total hysterectomy, and begin treatments. Through the loss and devastation, I used my imagination to cope. By embodying characters that could help me heal and by creating scenarios that were much more favourable than my current reality, I committed myself to a vision in which cancer could deliver tremendous healing to me, which I could then pass on to others.”

During her recovery, Marla developed Imagination Meets Cancer, a creative research initiative to understand and express how imagination is a viable tool in recovery. She is currently performing, collaborating, teaching, and feeling incredibly well!

You can find Marla on Instagram as @marlaohmarla.

Thank you to our partners at CIBC for supporting this series!

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