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Djanet Sears
Djanet Sears is an award-winning
playwright and director and has several acting award nominations to
her credit for both stage and screen. She is the recipient of the Stratford
Festival’s 2004 Timothy Findley Award, as well as Canada’s highest
literary honour for dramatic writing: the 1998 Governor General’s
Literary Award. She is the playwright and director of the multiple Dora
Award winning production of Harlem Duet (Scirocco Drama, 1997),
which was workshopped at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in NYC, where
Djanet was the international artist-in-residence in 1996. Her other
honours include: the 1998 Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, the
Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, the Harry Jerome Award for
Excellence in the Cultural Industries, and a Phenomenal Woman of the
Arts Award. Her most recent work for the stage, The Adventures of
a Black Girl in Search of God (Playwrights Canada Press, 2003),
was shortlisted for a 2004 Trillium Book Award and enjoyed a six-month
run in the fall/winter of 2003/2004, as part of the Mirvish Productions
season. Her other plays include Afrika Solo, Who Killed Katie
Ross and Double Trouble. Djanet is the driving force behind
the AfriCanadian
Playwrights’ Festival,
and a founding member of the Obsidian Theatre
Company. She is
also the editor of Testifyin': Contemporary African Canadian Drama,
Vols. I & II, the first anthologies of plays by playwrights
of African descent in Canada (Playwrights Canada Press, 2000 & 2003).
She is currently an adjunct professor at University College, University
of Toronto where she teaches playwriting.
“Perspective is nearly
everything. I needed to write from my own perspective. And that is also
Canadian. It's my wish for the theatre. I wish to see a theatre where
the world is reflected – like a garden. When we are planting our gardens
we do not just plant one flower, we do not even plant flowers that are
only one colour. We love to see this kind of leaf, that kind of bush,
these kinds of flowers. We just love the whole range. These kinds of
herbs…. That’s what humanity is, that’s what Canadians are. We
all look so different and I love it.”
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