Joy has always loved writing

FemFest 2007 – Playwright bios

Briana Brown

Raised in the village of Bayfield, ON, Briana is a graduate of York University (Honours BA) where she specialized in playwriting and directing. She has created and performed in a number of her own works and collaborations including The Star (Spring Arts Fair, Tarragon Theatre), More Than Breath (Paprika Festival, Tarragon Theatre), Medusa Moves (Rhubarb! Festival, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre) and her one-woman show, Cassandra, which toured the Canadian fringe festival circuit to critical success in the summer of 2006. Other credits include: Speech! (Toronto Fringe, director), The Vagina Monologues (V-Day Toronto, actor), The Photograph (New Ideas Festival, director), This is A Play, For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls (Actors Without Equity, actor) and The Outdoor Donnellys (Blyth Festival, actor). She is an Associate Member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada and a recipient of the George Ryga Award for playwriting.

Joy Eidse

Joy has always loved writing. She started by keeping a diary at the tender age of 7 and published the only issue of “The Burley Blonds of Canada” while still in high school. In her 20’s, she wrote for several independent music magazines and, later, began to experiment with playwriting. She has since written two plays. Joy is also a musician, songwriter and music teacher. She has worked as a pianist for Prairie Theatre Exchange’s theatre school as well as for “Loonisey” a children’s story telling and musical performance trio. She was also involved in “Artsability,” a project initiated by Manitoba Disability Studies to study the effects of artistic expression (including dance and visual art) on children with FAS/E in Northern Manitoba and is currently a member of the North End Artist’s Collective. Joy is a true Manitoban, having lived all over this province, at various times in her life, including Thompson, Gimli, Norway House and Winnipeg. She is currently working on her bachelor’s degree in inner city social work and is living in Winnipeg’s North End (the best part of this city!). She and her husband live in a home which provides a temporary supportive living environment for people at risk of homelessness while raising their two small children.

Marcia Johnson

Marcia Johnson’s plays include You Look Great Too for the Rhubarb! Festival at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Perfect on Paper at the Toronto Fringe Festival and a reading of Say Ginger Ale at the AfriCanadian Playwrights Festival. Marcia is also an accomplished writer of radio dramas. The radio version of Perfect on Paper won a silver medal at the New York International Radio Awards. Say Ginger Ale was a Canadian Screenwriter Awards finalist and also published by Scirroco Press. Her latest radio drama is Viola Desmond for CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition hosted by Michael Enright. Other accomplishments include being a member of the playwrights units of Theatre Passe Muraille and Obsidian Theatre Company as well as Playwright in Residence at Blyth Festival. She was also a member of the Siminovitch Prize Playwriting Master Class led by renowned Quebec playwright (and Siminovitch Prize-recipient) Carole Frechette. Besides Say Ginger Ale, Marcia has two plays in development. The first is Binti’s Journey based on The Heaven Shop by Deborah Ellis for Theatre Direct and The Hateship Game an adaptation of an Alice Munro short story for Blyth Festival. Marcia Johnson recently appearing in The Real McCoy by fellow actor-playwright, Andrew Moodie.

Mũmbi Kaigwa

Mũmbi Kaigwa is co-artistic director of The Theatre Company but also a celebrated performer, playwright and director. She has been seen in the television show “Neighbours” and the feature film “The Constant Gardener” as well as numerous stage roles (The Floods, For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Not Enough, Talking Heads). She also studied African Jazz dance. She has worked for the United Nations Drug Control Programme and UNICEF using arts based projects to work towards social change and is a former President of Women Playwrights International.

Diana Kolpak

Diana Kolpak is a performer, writer and director who has run her own Dora-nominated theatre company, Whetstone Productions, since 1994. Originally trained as a director, she began her explorations in the wild and wonderful world of clown performance after studying with Mump and Smoot's John Turner nine years ago. Her work focuses on integrating the anarchic energy of clown technique with other art forms, including poetry, music, photography, dance and film. Performance credits include: Tears of a Clown (Toronto Masque Theatre), The Gorgonetrevich Corps de Ballet Nationale in 'Bethany's Gate' (Whetstone), Goodnight, Ladies (Retro Rhubarb! 2004), The Girlie Show: an All-Girl Clown Extravaganza (Whetstone), Butterfly Body (Nightwood Groundswell Festival) and cabaret clown performances at the Toronto Festival of Clowns, International Circus Festival, Lunacy Cabaret, The S.P.A.C.E., and Cirque du Poulet. Bedtime Stories, Diana's first script, was excerpted in Taking the Stage: Plays by Canadian Women (Playwrights Canada Press) and The Urbanite, a magazine of surreal urban fiction. Other writing credits include Angel-Maker (Canadian Stage WORD! Festival), Fables for the Modern World (excerpted in the Playwrights Canada Press anthology Another Perfect Piece: Monologues from Canadian Plays) and Goodnight, Ladies (co-written with Stephanie Lalor).

Diana also writes short, dark, speculative fiction and is currently collaborating, as writer and model, with Toronto photographer Kathleen Finlay on a book about one clown's mythic quest to re-light the stars.

Cairn Moore

Cairn is an actor, director, educator and thanks to the encouragement of Hope McIntyre, a playwright. Her first solo play Absolute Perfection was produced in FemFest 2006. She teaches Intro. Performance at the University of Winnipeg and has just completed her fourth show with Venus.calm, playing Sophie in George F. Walker’s Featuring Loretta in this years Winnipeg Fringe Festival.

Nicolle Nattrass

Nicolle Nattrass is a Toronto based actor and playwright. She started writing monologues and numerous sketch comedy shows in between performing in regional theatre across Canada. What fun! Finally, she wrote and performed, a one-woman show called Brownie Points, Boldly Going Where No Browne Has Gone Before which received nominations for Outstanding Original Play and Outstanding Performance at the 1998 Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. In 2005, Brownie Points receive its American premiere at Red Hen Feminist Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio. She also wrote and starred in a CBC radio plot, based on the same character called, “Boldly Going Where No Brownie Has Gone Before”. She adapted her play into a short film which won Best Short Comedy at the 2003 Magnolia Independent Film Festival in Mississippi, USA. Her second play, a full length titled, Good House-keeping was workshopped at he Vancouver Playwrights Theatre Centre. She ahs currently finished a new one act play called, The Kindness of Kevin Barteski.

Carmen Paterson

Carmen Paterson is a graduate of the Rosebud School of the Arts where NAKED BARN first started under the mentorship of Lucia Frangione. She recently finished the play ASH ON MY TONGUE that received its first reading at Littlefest in Calgary. This past Christmas, Carmen was one of the writers for the comic variety show ST. NICK'S MAGICAL MYSTICAL MYSTERY TOUR performed at Rosebud Theatre. Selected Acting Credit include: HERE WE ARE, SURE THING, VILLAGE OF IDIOTS, THE KITE, and THE ADVENTURES OF WANDA

AND JACK.

Mira Sahay

Mira Sahay’s debut piece Bare Witness draws on Mira’s own history as a singer, poet, youth-care worker and survivor. It is Mira’s hope that this piece will draw attention to the need for education and understanding around issues of sexuality, violence, youth, family, and art.

Erin Shields

Erin Shields is a Toronto based theatre artist working in collective creation, multi-disciplinary collaboration, poetic monologue and traditional theatre. She is a founding member of Groundwater Productions through which she creates, develops and produces most of her work. Erin has an Honors BA in Acting from Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama

in London, England. Recent creations include Goblin Market (Dora Nominated, Groundwater/Belltower), Ubu Roi (Groundwater), Connect the Dots (Small Wooden Shoe/Buddies), The Paradise Project (Groundwater/Red) and Housebound (an eight woman collective creation). Erin is writing her next play, A New Nation, as part of the Tarragon Playwright’s Unit. The Unfortunate Misadventures of Masha Galinski has been performed at the Toronto Fringe, The Diesel Playhouse and The Uno Festival and Erin continues to develop the script with Nightwood’s Groundswell Playwright’s Unit.

Sally Stubbs

Sally is delighted that her new script—Spinning You Home—has been selected for production by Sarasvati Productions’ FemFest 2007. Sally is an award-winning playwright and teacher/director of theatre and film with, by, and for young people; a performer who loves to clown; Pacific Cinémathèque’s new Education Director; and co-artistic producer of Tightrope Productions. She recently directed her script, Wreckage, to critical acclaim for Tightrope Productions in Vancouver and Kamloops, B.C. Sally is currently engaged in a number of writing projects and thanks the B.C. Arts Council for its support of her full-length script in process: I Choose. This year she entered UBC’s MFA Program in Creative Writing (Optional Residency).