Yvette Nolan is a playwright, dramaturg, director and educator. As a dramaturg, she works across Canada, most recently at Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre Spring Festival of New Plays. She has received the Maggie Bassett Award for service to the theatre community and was the Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts from 2003-2011. She was recently awarded the City of Toronto’s Aboriginal Affairs Award. 

After graduating from the Université de Moncton’s School of Dramatic Art, Marcia Babineau went on to study at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York. A multifaceted artist, actress, director and educator, she is the Artistic Director and one of the founding members of Théâtre l’Escaouette.

As an actress, Marcia has more than 40 stage acting credits, including her more recent roles in Pour une fois and Laurie ou la vie de galerie. Her memorable film performances include Les Années Noires and Madame Latour. A passionate creator, Marcia Babineau has also directed some thirty productions including Les Remugles, Winslow, Oleanna, Ne jamais nager seul, Les débuts de Loretta, Le jeu de la Mélancolie, Mistero Buffo, Cul de Sac, La vieille femme près de la voie ferrée, Vie d ‘Cheval and Des Nouvelles de Copenhague. She taught acting at the Université de Moncton’s School of Dramatic Art from 2007 to 2021, during which time she took the helm of the department as its director from 2016 to 2021.

Geneviève Pelletier is a Métis actor and theater director from Treaty 1 Territory. Since 2012, she is the artistic and general director of le Théâtre Cercle Molière in Saint-Boniface. She is interested in nurturing a fertile creative space that includes as many cultures as there are voices, one that reflects the various communities she is engaged with.

Montreal playwright Carole Fréchette had authored more than eight plays when she won the Siminovitch Prize, most of which had been published within the preceding five years. In announcing their choice, the jury described Ms. Fréchette as an artist “at the height of her powers, with the wind full in her sails” and expressed the desire that Canadians come “to know and to cherish” this writer. “In an especially fresh and startling way she uses the mysteries of theatre to explore the mysteries of our daily lives,” said the jury citation. “Her plays negotiate that delicate balance of the known and the unknown, the forever accessible and the forever exotic, which is the property of all great art.” 

Ms. Fréchette’s plays are among those that have enjoyed success around the world. Her plays have been translated and staged in Belgium, France, Germany, Lebanon, Luxemburg, Mexico, Romania, Switzerland and Syria, in addition to their successful performances in Canadian theatres.

Jillian Keiley is the founding Artistic Director of Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, where she has directed 14 new productions, almost all of which were original scripts and scores created for the company by playwright Robert Chafe and composer Petrina Bromley. For the past 10 years, Ms. Keiley has been working with Artistic Fraud to develop a unique, mathematic and music-based choreography and directing system called Kaleidography. Ms. Keiley has been teaching this new system at universities and professional training institutes across the country for the past six years. Jillian recently joined the Siminovitch Board of Directors. 

Leanna Brodie is a playwright and performer whose plays include The Vic, For Home and Country, Schoolhouse, and The Book of Esther. Ulla’s Odyssey, her Flourish Prize-winning opera with New Zealand composer Anthony Young, toured the UK for two years with OperaUpClose. Brodie is also a leading translator of contemporary Québécois and Franco-Canadian playwrights. Recent premieres have included David Paquet’s Wildfire (Factory Theatre, Toronto: three 2022 Dora Mavor Moore Awards including Best New Play and Production); Joe Jack et John’s Violette (Espace Libre/PuSh Festival); Mohsen El Gharbi’s Omi Mouna (Impact Festival/Infinithéâtre); Anaïs Pellin’s Clementine (Carousel Theatre/PHT, Vancouver); Fanny Britt’s Benevolence (Ruby Slippers Theatre/Pacific Theatre); and Rébecca Déraspe’s I Am William (Stratford Festival and Théâtre le Clou). Brodie recently served as Assistant Professor (Playwriting) at UBC’s School of Creative Writing. Salesman in China, which she is co-writing with Jovanni Sy, will premiere at the Stratford Festival in 2024. 

Marcus Youssef has written and co-written some of Canada’s best-known theatrical investigations of otherness and difference, including Winners and Losers, King Arthur’s Night (which recently played at the NAC as part of the Canada Scene Festival), Leftovers, How Has My Love Affected You?, Ali & Ali, Chloe’s Choice, Everyone, Adrift, Peter Panties, Jabber and A Line in the Sand. His works have been performed across North America, Australia and Europe, and published by Talonbooks and Playwrights Canada Press. Awards: Canada Council Lynch-Staunton Award, Rio-Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award, Chalmers Award, Arts Club Silver Commission, Vancouver Critics’ Choice (three times), a Governor General’s Literary nomination, and numerous Jessie Richardson Awards, Dora Mavor Moore Awards, Montreal English Theatre Awards and nominations. Marcus is Artistic Director of Vancouver’s Neworld Theatre, and co-founder of the artist-run production centre, PL1422. In 2016 and 2017 he was Senior Playwright-in-Residence at the Banff Playwrights Colony. Marcus is Editorial Advisor to Canadian Theatre Review, Canadian Fellow to the International Society for Performing Arts and Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. 

Rosa Laborde is a critically acclaimed Chilean Canadian Playwright, Screenwriter, Director, and Actor. As a playwright she’s been produced across Canada at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, The Great Canadian Theatre Company, Neptune Theatre, Touchstone Firehall Theatre and The Belfry Theatre as well as performances at Playwright’s Horizons and the Arthur Seelen Theatre in New York City. She’s been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, been nominated twice for the Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new play and received the KM Hunter Artist’s Award for Theatre. Currently she’s commissioned by the Factory Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, and The Stratford Festival of Canada. Rosa is a graduate of The Oxford School of Drama in Oxford, England, and The Canadian Film Centre’s Primetime Television Writing Program and moves seamlessly between theatre and film. Most recently she co-created, wrote, and stars in the upcoming Crave Original series Nesting.

Geneviève Billette is a writer living in Montreal. With a degree in French Studies from the University of Montreal and playwriting from the National Theatre School, she devoted herself to writing, translation and is a professor at the School of Theatre at the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM). 

Jessica is a bilingual actor, playwright and teacher. She spent seven seasons at the Stratford Festival, climbing the ranks to starring roles in All’s Well that Ends Well and Richard III in 2022. Originally from Montreal, she has performed in both English and French on stage and on screen. Her work has reached Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Stratford, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Calgary. Her first two plays, Pandora and The Dark Lady, both had their world premiere productions in 2023 with Prairie Theatre Exchange, Shakespeare in the Ruins and Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan. Both plays are slated to be published in 2024. A subsequent production of The Dark Lady is programmed this fall in Calgary, a copro between Lunchbox Theatre and The Shakespeare Company. Jessica is a graduate from Dawson College, McGill University and the Birmingham Conservatory. She’s a visiting instructor and coach at the National Theatre School of Canada, teaching Chekhov and Shakespeare.