Playwrights Lab 2026

Nina Lee Aquino, a Filipino Canadian, is a renowned director, dramaturge, and artistic leader. Her journey began as the inaugural Artistic Director of fu-GEN Asian Canadian theatre company, where she organized the first Asian Canadian theatre conference and edited a seminal anthology of Asian Canadian plays, alongside co-editing an award-winning book on the subject. She became Artistic Director at Cahoots Theatre Company and Factory Theatre, leading to her current role as Artistic Director of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre.

Aquino's directorial work has garnered prestigious awards, including the Ken McDougall Award, John Hirsch Prize, Toronto Theatre Critics Award for Best Director, and three Dora Awards for Outstanding Direction. She co-authored the play Miss Orient(ed) and serves as an Adjunct Professor at York University. Additionally, Aquino was the President of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatre from 2018-2024. In 2019, she was honored with the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Margo Bindhart and Rita Davies Cultural Leadership Award.

Photo by Cesar Ghisilieri
 

Keith Barker is a Métis artist from Northwestern Ontario. Keith is the director of the Foerster Bernstein New Play Development Program at the Stratford Festival, and the former Artistic Director at Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto.
In 2023, Keith was a recipient of the Johanna Metcalf Prize, in 2020 he received a Dora Mavor Award for Outstanding New Play and the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Carol Bolt Award. Keith was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Drama in 2018 for his play, This Is How We Got Here. He received a Saskatchewan and Area Theatre Award for Achievement in Playwriting for his play, The Hours That Remain, as well as a Yukon Arts Award for Best Art for Social Change. Keith returned to the stage in 2023, playing Louis Riel in France Koncan's Women of the Furtrade for the Stratford Festival. Other acting credits include Richard Hannay in Bruce County Playhouse's The 39 Steps, Cornwall in the National Arts Centre's Production of King Lear, Roger Hughes in Seeds, and Bernard Smoke in Fury at the Blyth Festival.
 

Born in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, and raised in Northern Ontario, Colleen Murphy won the 2016 and 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for English Language Drama for her plays Pig Girl and The December Man / L'homme de décembre respectively. Both plays were also awarded a Carol Bolt Award. Other plays include The Breathing Hole (shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Carol Bolt Award), The Society For The Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, I Hope My Heart Burns First, Armstrong's War, The Goodnight Bird, The Piper, and Beating Heart Cadaver, which was shortlisted for a Governor General's Literary Award. She is also a librettist - Fantasma for composer lan Cusson, My Mouth On Your Heart for composer August Murphy-King, and Oksana G. for composer Aaron Gervais - and is an award-winning filmmaker. She has been Writer-in-Residence at seven universities and Playwright-in-Residence at two Canadian theatres as well as at Finborough Theatre in the UK. She is a member of the Order of Canada. 

Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) is a playwright, director and dramaturg who works across Turtle Island. Her works include the plays The Unplugging and Annie Mae’s Movement, the dance-opera Bearing, the libretto Shanawdithit, the short play-for-film Katharsis, the VR piece Reconciling. She recently co-created Wreckonciliation with Marion Newman and Melody Courage at Opera Kelowna, and is working on a musical adaptation of The Englishman’s Boy with Ian Cusson, Allan Gilliland, Josh Languedoc, Vern Thiessen and Royce Vavrek. Other directing projects include Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade at Stratford Festival, Julie Tamiko Manning’s Mizushōbai at Tableau d’Hôte, Leah-Simone Bowen’s The Flood at Imago, both in Montreal, and Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s play The First Stone at New Harlem and GCTC in Toronto and Ottawa. From 2003-2011, she served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts. Her book, Medicine Shows, about Indigenous performance in Canada was published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015. 

Emma is Artist in Residence at Concordia University, and a Director and Dramaturg. She is the former Artistic and Executive Director of Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal, where for fourteen years, she dramaturgically collaborated on many plays, including Mizushōbai by Julie Tamiko Manning, Thy Woman’s Weeds by Erin Shields, Jabber by Marcus Youssef, Squawk by Megan Gail Coles, Instant by Erin Shields, I am Genius, Does Anyone Here Know Me? by Lois Brown, and Behaviour by Darrah Teitel.

Emma has directed new Canadian plays across the country, including Grace and Falling Trees by Megan Gail Coles, Okinum by Emilie Monnet (co-director), Refuge by Mary Vingoe, I Don’t Even Miss You by Elena Belyea, The Baklawa Recipe by Pascale Rafie. She co-founded Talisman Theatre for whom she directed, among others, the award-winning productions That Woman by Daniel Danis, Down Dangerous Passes Road by Michel Marc Bouchard, and The Medea Effect by Suzie Bastien. She co-created Skin, a performance piece with the interdisciplinary company The Bakery.

Emma is a recipient of LMDA’s Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy, and the Conseil Québécois du théâtre Prix Sentinelle.  She is a graduate of Concordia University’s Theatre Department, and NTS’ Directing Program. She feeds her inner punk rocker by playing in basement bands The Tibaldos and The Dépanneurds

PHOTO: Bernardo Fernandez

BRANDEN JACOBS-JENKINS (Playwright) is a Brooklyn-based writer and a professor in the practice at Yale University. His plays include Purpose, Appropriate, The Comeuppance, Girls, Everybody, War, Gloria, An Octoroon and Neighbors. His work has received the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Tony, New York Drama Critics’ Circle, Lortel, Drama League, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Jeff and Obie awards. His other honors include the Tennessee Williams Award, the Windham-Campbell prize, and the MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. A graduate of Juilliard’s playwriting program, he is the vice president of the Dramatists Guild council and serves on the boards of DGF, Soho Rep and the Park Avenue Armory.