Emerging Artist (Selected by Adrienne Wong)

Howard Dai is a Taiwanese actor, writer, director, and theatre maker based in so-called Vancouver whose work has been seen across Canada. His performances and creations have existed in theatre, films, public spaces, Zoom screens, Google Sheets, automated phone calls, interactive websites, and virtual reality. As an actor, he was most recently seen onstage in Halifax, Ottawa, and Stratford. In 2022, he was the digital-artist-in-residence with PuSh Festival (Vancouver, Canada) and Royal Court Theatre (London, UK) with his play 菠蘿麵包Pineapple Bun, which explores nostalgia and diasporic guilt set in quotidian Taiwan. His most recent work-in-development Dream Machine, is an interactive game show where the audience gambles on their dreams in an arcade. He is a member of the Five Blessings Collective, an associate artist with rice & beans theatre, and holds a BFA in Theatre Performance from SFU School for the Contemporary Arts.