The Siminovitch Prize, Canada’s most valuable theatre award, today announced a shortlist of four exceptional mid-career artists who are expanding the possibilities of the art form. Selected by a national jury chaired by Guillermo Verdecchia, the 2025 Siminovitch Prize finalists are Ravi Jain (Toronto, ON), Anne-Marie Olivier (Québec, QC), Estelle Shook (Armstrong, BC), and Adrienne Wong (Victoria/Calgary, BC/AB).
To mark its 25th anniversary, the Siminovitch Theatre Foundation paused its traditional three-year cycle of honouring directors, playwrights, and designers to welcome nominations from these three disciplines, as well as from theatre creators whose work does not fall strictly into the three established Siminovitch Prize categories. The four artists honoured this year together demonstrate the extraordinary breadth of Canadian theatre today.
“The 2025 Siminovitch Prize shortlist shows that theatre is not one form but many — digital and local, intimate and epic, portable and site-specific — and that all these forms can speak powerfully to our time.” — Guillermo Verdecchia, Jury Chair
The Siminovitch Theatre Foundation has also increased the total purse to $170,000: the Laureate will receive $100,000; each of the three finalists will receive $10,000; the Protégé chosen by the Laureate will receive $25,000; and three additional emerging artists selected by the finalists will receive $5,000 each. The 2025 Siminovitch Prize Laureate will be announced on December 1, 2025 (8 p.m.ET), following the premiere of short documentary portraits of each shortlisted artist.
THE 2025 SIMINOVITCH PRIZE FINALISTS
Presented by Power Corporation of Canada
RAVI JAIN
A visionary maker whose practice collides movement, music, realism, devised methods, and social practice, Ravi Jain is the founder and co-artistic director of Why Not Theatre. He has created over 40 collaborations, touring across five continents. From Prince Hamlet—a radical, fully integrated ASL/English interpretation placing a Deaf Horatio at the centre—to the epic Mahabharata (Shaw Festival, Barbican, Lincoln Center), Jain’s work reframes classic and contemporary narratives through equity of experience and radical inclusion.
“Art is a tool for social change… a rehearsal for the world we want to create.” — Ravi Jain
ANNE-MARIE OLIVIER
Anne-Marie Olivier blends documentary and fiction through a methodology of gathering true stories, crafting works that hold social reality and poetic language in the same breath—Venir au monde (Governor General’s Literary Award), Faire l’amour, Annette, Maurice. A celebrated performer and former Artistic Director of Théâtre du Trident, her solo and ensemble works open space for marginalized narratives with courage, virtuosity, and profound empathy.
“Theatre continues to be an essential balm: a transformative agent, a vector of collective intelligence, of education, of transfiguration, of the creation of light(s)” — Anne-Marie Olivier
ESTELLE SHOOK
A national leader in large-scale outdoor, site-specific, land-based theatre, Estelle Shook has built an internationally watched model at Caravan Farm Theatre, where story, environment and community are inseparable—often including human and equine performers, and programming year-round on eighty acres of Secwepemc and Syilx territories. Her eco-dramaturgical practice and rural community convening are transforming how Canadian theatre engages land, sustainability, and audience.
“I believe theatre can and should be more integrated into civil society, to serve as an encounter with the mystery at the heart of existence and entertainment and a community practice, alive and expressive and accessible to all.” — Estelle Shook
ADRIENNE WONG
For two decades, Adrienne Wong has pioneered participatory and live-digital performance—“podplays,” locative audio works, platform-native theatre, and national knowledge-sharing through FOLDA. From The Apology Generator (CBC Q residency) to sector-shifting experiments at Neworld and SpiderWebShow, Wong uses ostensibly “soulless” technologies to excavate our humanity, inviting audiences to give more than attention and reshaping creation processes across the country.
“Live theatre is uniquely able to introduce friction into an increasingly gamified world. I make events that reconnect audience members to the tender and delightful experience of being a human in relation to other humans.” — Adrienne Wong
MEDIA CONTACT
Ashley Belmer, B-Rebel PR
ash@b-rebelpr.com | 416-617-8934
