Mentor
Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) is a playwright, director and dramaturg. Her plays include The Unplugging, Annie Mae’s Movement, The Birds, The Diviners (with Vern Thiessen), The Art of War. She also works in opera, as the librettist and co-director of Shanawdithit, the librettist of Sophia, and the director of Indians on Vacation and Empire of Wild. She co-created, with Joel Bernbaum and Lancelot Knight, the verbatim play Reasonable Doubt, about relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan. She recently directed the world premieres of Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s The First Stone in Toronto and Ottawa, The Flood, by Leah Simone Bowen, and Mizushobai by Julie Tamiko Manning, both in Montreal, as well as the Stratford and Globe productions of Frances Koncan’s Women of the Fur Trade. She is currently working on the National Climate Play with Joel Bernbaum, which will workshop in Whitehorse at Awaken Festival in April. From 2003-2011, she served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. Her book, Medicine Shows, about Indigenous performance in Canada was published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015, and Performing Indigeneity (co-edited with Ric Knowles) in 2016. She recently defended her Master’s thesis, about governance in non-profit theatres, at Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy.