Carmen Aguirre

Carmen Aguirre

Finalist, 2020

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Biography

Carmen Aguirre is an award-winning theatre artist and author who has written and co-written more than 25 plays, including Chile Con Carne, The Refugee Hotel, The Trigger, Blue Box, Broken Tailbone, and Anywhere But Here, as well as the international bestseller and #1 in Canada, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (winner of CBC Canada Reads 2012), and its bestselling sequel, Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution. Carmen is currently writing an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea for Vancouver’s Rumble Theatre, and Moliere’s The Learned Ladies for Toronto’s Factory Theatre. She is a Core Artist at Electric Company Theatre and a co-founding member of the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition (CALTAC). She has more than 80 film, TV, and stage acting credits, including her award-winning lead role in the Canadian premiere of Stephen Adley Guirgis’ The Motherfucker with the Hat, and her Leo-nominated lead performance in the independent feature film Bella Ciao!. She is a graduate of Studio 58.

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Christian Barry

Christian Barry

Finalist, 2018

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Biography

Christian Barry is a multi-award winning director and theatre-maker from Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a co-founder and artistic co-director of 2b theatre company.

Christian’s productions have played at renowned festivals and theatres around the world including Bristol Old Vic, Edinburgh Fringe, Sydney Festival, Tarragon Theatre, Citadel Theatre, Magnetic North Festival, PuSh, Noorderzon, Aarhus Festival, Theaterformen Hanover, Luminato, World Stage, and 59E59 (Off-Broadway in New York City).

Christian won the 2019 Toronto Theatre Critics Circle Awards for Best Director and Best New Musical. He was nominated for six Drama Desk Awards in 2018, including Best Director and Best Production. He won a Dora Award for Outstanding Production, and was nominated for an Outstanding Director Dora. Christian received the 2008 Halifax Mayor’s award for an Emerging Artist, the 2006-7 Urjo Kareda residency grant at the Tarragon Theatre, and the 2018 NS Masterworks Award — the highest honour for the Arts in the province.

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Camellia Koo

Camellia Koo

Finalist, 2018

Protégé, 2006

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Camellia is a Toronto-based designer for theatre, opera and dance. Recent theatre collaborations include designs for Cahoots Theatre Projects, Factory Theatre, Shaw Festival, Stratford Festival, National Arts Centre and Tarragon Theatre. Opera collaborations include designs for Against the Grain, Boston Lyric Opera, Canadian Opera Company, Edmonton Opera, Helikon Opera (Moscow), Minnesota Opera, Pacific Opera Victoria and Tapestry New Opera. She is a graduate of Ryerson Theatre School and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Camellia has received six Dora Mavor Moore Awards (Toronto), a Sterling Award (Edmonton), a Chalmers Award Grant, shared the 2006 Siminovitch Protégé Prize, Third Prize Team 2011 European Opera Directing Prize, and the 2016 Virginia and Myrtle Cooper Award for Costume Design. Upcoming projects include designs for Hansel and Gretel (Edmonton Opera), Shawnadithit (Tapestry New Opera), La Bohème (Santa Fe Opera) and The Mahabharata (Why Not/Shaw Festival).

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Itai Erdal

Itai Erdal

Finalist, 2018, 2024

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Biography

Itai Erdal is an acclaimed lighting designer, writer, performer, and the founder of The Elbow Theatre in Vancouver. With over 300 lighting designs for theatre, dance, and opera across more than 50 cities in North America and Europe, his work includes collaborations with notable companies such as the Stratford Festival, Vancouver Opera, and Arts Club. His accolades include six Jessie Richardson Awards, a Dora Mavor Moore Award, and the Edinburgh Lustrum Award, among others.

Last updated November 2024.

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Evelyne de la Chenelière

Evelyne de la Chenelière

Finalist, 2017

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Biography

Writer and actor Evelyne de la Chenelière was born in Montreal in 1975. A former member of the Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental, the company co-founded by Jean-Pierre Ronfard, she approaches playwriting as a research laboratory, a creative workshop where she develops a score destined for the stage, a text written to inhabit the actors’ bodies. Her plays, produced (in the original French and in translation) in Quebec, across Canada and around the world, are also literary works in their own right, and investigate the ways language shapes thought and expression. Lumières, lumières, lumières, premiered in October 2014 and directed by Denis Marleau, launched Evelyne’s three-year artistic residency at ESPACE GO, where her unique process includes writing on one of the theatre’s interior walls.

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Jonathan Christenson

Jonathan Christenson

Finalist, 2016

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Biography

Jonathan Christenson is a director, writer and composer who has spearheaded the creation of twenty-two original Canadian productions, many of which have had an international reach. He has directed at more than 85 theatres across Canada, the UK, Australia and the United States including in London’s West End and New York’s Broadway district. His work has been recognized with more than 100 awards and nominations, including a Lucille Lortel nomination for Outstanding New Musical of the 2015 Off-Broadway season. His plays have been published by Playwrights Canada Press, Newest Press and Bayeaux Arts, recordings of his music can be found on iTunes and at Broadway Records, and his productions are featured in American Theatre, Maclean’s, CTR, and PRISM International. He was named one of “Alberta’s Fifty Most Influential People” by Venture Magazine and Alberta Playwrights Network chose him as one of Alberta’s one hundred most significant theatre artists of the past one hundred years.

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Nancy Tobin

Nancy Tobin

Finalist, 2015

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Biography

Nancy Tobin is a sound artist and designer for theatre productions. Her collaborations have been presented in Canada and internationally for nearly twenty­five years. Amongst others, she has worked with directors Denis Marleau (Les Aveugles, Quelqu’un va venir, Intérieur, Les Reines, Othello) and François Girard (Le Procès, Novecento). She also has collaborated with choreographer Danièle Desnoyers (Concerto Grosso pour corps et instruments, Duos pour corps et instruments).

Nancy Tobin specializes in vocal amplification specifically for theatre and has developed a unique style using unusual audio speakers to transform the sound qualities of her creations. She regularly speaks about her work in conferences in Canada, the United States and Europe. She teaches sound design at UQAM’s École supérieure de théâtre.

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Trevor Schwellnus

Trevor Schwellnus

Finalist, 2015

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Biography

Trevor Schwellnus is a scenographer, designing sets, lighting, and video with Independent theatre companies in Toronto. He is also Artistic Producer of Aluna Theatre, where he directed and designed What I learned from a decade of fear and Nohayquiensepa, and he designed Blood Wedding, La Comunión, Madre, and For Sale. He produces the panamerican ROUTES | RUTAS panamericanas International Festival of Performance for Human Rights, and in 2013 he curated Harbourfront’s HATCH series of emerging performance.

Other collaborators include Modern Times (The Sheep and the Whale, Waiting for Godot, Hallaj), Obsidian Theatre (Shakespeare’s Nigga, Born Ready / Pusha Man), Ame Henderson (/dance/songs/, 300 Tapes, Relay), Unpsun Theatre (Minotaur, The Speedy), Small Wooden Shoe (Dedicated to the Revolutions, Antigone Dead People), Evan Webber and Frank Cox­O’Connell (Ajax & Little Iliad), The Theatre Centre, Jumblies, Fixtpoint, Buddies in Bad Times, Independent Aunties, Liza Balkan, Susie Burpee, Marie­Josée Chartier, and others. He has 5 Dora Awards from 14 nominations.

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Michelle Ramsay

Michelle Ramsay

Finalist, 2021

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Biography

Michelle Ramsay is an award-winning lighting designer who has created designs for dance, theatre, and opera companies across Canada and around the world. The evolution of Michelle’s unique aesthetic can be seen throughout her 20-year career on the spectrum between small, independent shows and large-scale productions.

Selected designs: acts of faith, Lady Sunrise (Factory Theatre); Sherlock Holmes and the Raven’s Curse, The Russian Play (Shaw Festival); A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Our Town (Theatre Rusticle); Broken Tailbone (Nightswimming); Shanawdihit (Tapestry Opera); Lilies (lemonTree Creations/Why Not); School Girls(Obsidian/Nightwood); The Royale(Soulpepper); Daughter (Quiptake/Pandemic); The Magic Hour – co-designed with Jennifer Tipton (Jess Dobkin).

Michelle has also been a coach and mentor at the National Theatre School, X University, and Humber College. She is co-founder of the Designer’s Guild (a national social media discussion group) and on the Board of the Associated Designers of Canada.

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Linda Brunelle

Linda Brunelle

Finalist, 2021

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Biography

After graduating from a Theatre Arts programme, Linda Brunelle has created costumes for theatre, opera, dance and the universe of circus. Through an interdisciplinary approach which combines theatre, performance and visual arts.

Linda explores the symbolic discourse of the body in space and the potential of expression of matter by itself, as well as the form it might take. She has honed her skills with the greatest names in Québécois, Canadian and European theatre. She had the privilege of representing Québec at the exhibits of the Quadriennale de Prague in1999, 2007 and 2019 as well as at the A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre in Moscow: “Costume at the Turn of the Century 1990-2015“. She teaches costume design at the National Theatre School of Canada and at the École supérieure de théâtre of the Université du Québec in Montréal.

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Michel Marc Bouchard

Michel Marc Bouchard

Finalist, 2014

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Biography

Bouchard’s writing marries a mature and poetic voice with an adventurous theatricality. He creates compelling and irreverent characters; often outsiders trying to negotiate their way through a difficult world in plays such as Lilies and Christina, The Girl King. His work has been widely seen across Canada in both French and English, including productions at the Stratford and Shaw Festivals.

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Marie-Josée Bastien

Marie-Josée Bastien

Finalist, 2013

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Biography

Marie-Josée Bastien runs her own company Les Enfants Terribles, in Québec City. She is renowned for her ability to make a veritable symphony of her productions, which have ranged from new work to the classics, and which demand virtuoso efforts from all her collaborators, actors, designers and composers. She has made an enormous contribution to the theatre in Québec City and virtually created a new theatrical vocabulary through her highly musical use of language and images.

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