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Playwrights Canada Press is pleased to announce the formation of an editorial committee. The committee will recommend plays for publication, surveying the theatre landscape through their work as artists and creators. This committee will help ensure that more voices are represented in the consideration of plays for publication, an action that we committed to in June 2020.

The members of the inaugural committee, serving for 2022-2023, are Dian Marie Bridge, Santiago Guzmán, Jenna Rodgers, Deneh’Cho Thompson, and Colin Wolf.

The committee will work separately from our existing submission process. If you have a play you’d like to send in for publication consideration please review the full guidelines here.

Dian Marie Bridge is an award-winning theatre maker and creative producer. She is currently the associate artistic director for Luminato Festival Toronto. Two decades of practice have afforded Dian work with many organizations as a playwright, director, dramaturg, performer, producer, curator, and mentor. She is known for her work with Luminato Festival Toronto, Maison Depoivre Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, the Stratford Festival, Volcano, BAND Gallery, Obsidian Theatre, Canadian Stage, Mirvish Productions, Soulpepper Theatre, the Playwrights Guild of Canada, and the Guthrie Theatre (Minneapolis). She holds a degree in Theatre Arts and Dramatic Literature from Brock University and attended the University of Minnesota’s Theatre and Dance program.

Dian is the recipient of the inaugural Strombergs Family Realization Fund through Nightwood Theatre, the Stratford Festival’s Elliott Hayes Guthrie Award for Playwriting, and SummerWorks’s RBC Professional Award. Dian was also a part of the Stratford Festival’s inaugural Michael Langham Workshop for Classical Direction and has been a mentor through the Paprika Festival, AMY Project, Speak Sudan, b current’s RaizinArtz, Only One You workshops, and the Boys and Girls Club of Vancouver. 

Santiago Guzmán (he/him) is a writer, performer, director, and dramaturg originally from Metepec, Mexico, now based in St. John’s, NL. He is the artistic director of TODOS Productions, the artistic associate for Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre, and the general manager of Neighbourhood Dance Works in St. John’s, NL. He is a proud member of The Quilted Collective.

His plays have been supported, developed, and/or produced by theatre companies and festivals across the country, like TODOS Productions (NL), Resource Centre for the Arts Theatre Company (NL), Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland (NL), Rising Tide Theatre (NL), Neighbourhood Dance Works (NL), Eastern Front Theatre (NS), Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre (NS), Ship’s Company Theatre (NS), Boca del Lupo (BC), Paprika Festival (ON), and the National Theatre School of Canada’s Art Apart program (QC).

He was the dramaturge for the Fundy Fringe Festival in NB in 2020 and he is currently working with Halifax Theatre for Young People as a dramaturg on a project about immigrants in Atlantic Canada. He recently participated in Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre’s 2021 Playwrights Retreat as lead and assistant dramaturg.

Jenna Rodgers is a mixed-race director and dramaturg based on Treaty 7 Territory. She is the founding artistic director of Chromatic Theatre—a company dedicated to producing and developing work by and for artists of colour. Jenna is also the dramaturg for the Playwrights Lab at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the board co-chair of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), and the Artstrek director for Theatre Alberta. She is a passionate arts equity advocate, a graduate of the NTS Artistic Leadership Residency (2020) and the Banff Centre’s Cultural Leadership Program (2019), and a member of the artEquity National Facilitator Training cohort (2018). She was shortlisted for the 2021 Gina’s Prize and is the recipient of a 2018 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Award for Emerging Artists. She holds a M.A. in International Performance Research from the universities of Amsterdam and Tampere. 

Deneh’Cho Thompson (he/they) is a director, actor, and playwright and a displaced and dispossessed member of the Pehdzeh ki Nation. His artistic practice focuses on new plays and new play development. Acting credits include the world premieres of Iron Peggy by Marie Clements, Redpatch by Sean Oliver Harris and Raes Calvert, and Thanks for Giving by Kevin Loring. As Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan Deneh’Cho oversees the wîcêhtowin Theatre Program, one of few Indigenous theatre programs at a Canadian university. Deneh’Cho’s research focuses on the development, naming, and centring of Indigenous pedagogies; new play development (in various roles); and Indigenous collaborations—centering the values of reciprocity, respect, and reflexivity. Deneh’Cho is also engaged in the (re)storying of personal family archives focusing on healing, resilience, and Indigenous storywork as a pathway towards the creation of new works of theatre.

Colin Wolf is a Métis performer, theatre maker, and activist from the northeast of Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary), AB, on Treaty 7 Territory. Wolf graduated with a BFA in Performance from the University of Lethbridge in 2014, and then spent the next five years making theatre all over the prairies with dear friends, trusted colleagues, and complicated colonial institutions. His theatre work has focused on the development of new, Indigenous, and politically activated theatre. Wolf co-founded Thumbs Up Good Work Theatre Collective with his sister Caleigh Crow in 2013 when they recognized a gap in the Calgary theatre scene for independent, Indigenous, and working-class artists. Their most recent project, The Born Again Crow, explored themes of racism, capitalism, and violence on a supernatural scale. Wolf is working on the development of a number of projects in collaboration with other artists including Coy Wolf, Big McCoy,and Hucksterland—you should ask him about these! After cutting his teeth in TYA, on regional stages, and in indie theatre in the prairies, Wolf felt the call of the North and moved to Whitehorse in October 2019 to serve as the artistic director at Gwaandak Theatre Society on the territory of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta’an Kwäch’än Council. Since then he has occupied his time picking berries, snowshoeing, and tending to the artistic landscape to encourage the development of thriving art makers.