Jessica Anne Nelson (she/her) is an award-winning theatre director, creator, producer, and intimacy director, living and working on the stolen, occupied, and traditional homelands of the Coast Salish peoples; the xwməθkwəyə (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh (Squamish),  ̓Səlílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓ ic̓ əy̓ (Katzie), q̓ wɑ:n̓ ƛən̓ (Kwantlen), and Semiahma (Semiahmoo) Nations. Jessica sets the bar for creating respectful, caring, and imaginative spaces for artists to play and explore in her gripping and provocative productions. Her intimacy direction centers on the principles of creating consent based and trauma informed work and she has trained with the National Society of Intimacy Professionals (Canada) and Theatrical Intimacy Education (USA). With her MFA in Directing (UBC), and many years of experience in devising, creation-based techniques, and community collaborations, her work focuses on stories that shine a light on stereotypically negative or dark characters and stories, while also striving for social change. Jessica is praised as being one of the most kind- and open-hearted directors’ actors have had the pleasure to work with. She has been honoured with the Sydney J. Risk Award in Directing, Yvonne Firkins Prize, John Brockington Scholarship in Theatre (UBC) and was an inaugural recipient of the Bill Millerd Artist Fund (Arts Club Theatre). Some of her favourite past productions include In Camera (Realwheels Theatre, Intimacy Director, 2022), Something Rotten! & We Will Rock You (Theatre Under the Stars, Intimacy Director, 2022), Cipher (Arts Club Theatre Company & Vertigo Theatre, Assistant Director and Co-Intimacy Director, 2020 & 2022) Romance, Relationships & Rights (Anvil Centre, 2019), Consensual (Peninsula Productions, 2018), The Crucible (2018), girls!girls!girls! (2017) (Theatre@UBC), Othello (Bard on the Beach, Apprentice Director, 2016), The Competition is Fierce (ITSAZOO, Assistant Director, 2015), and Ithaka (2016), AFTER (2014), and Meanwhile (2013) (Excavation Theatre). 

 Joan MacLeod, playwright (born at Vancouver). Joan MacLeod studied creative writing at the University of Victoria (BA 1978), where she became an associate professor in 2004, and at the University of British Columbia (MFA 1981). She was encouraged to write plays while attending a poetry workshop at the Banff Centre in 1984. Her poetic, lyrical plays are characterized by evocative imagery and layered themes that consider the complexities of personal and political relationships. MacLeod sees all of her plays as political, exploring the often unacknowledged tensions and conflicts in an apparently peaceful Canadian society. She believes in the power of the imagination to transform reality and enable hope. Despite natural and political cataclysms, individuals can recreate their lives.

MacLeod's first produced work was the libretto for a chamber opera, The Secret Garden, presented by Comus Theatre in Toronto in 1985; it won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for best new musical in 1986. She joined the Playwrights Unit at Toronto's TARRAGON THEATRE in 1985, and remained playwright-in-residence there for 7 years. Her first play, Jewel, is a monologue spoken by a young woman to her dead husband, who drowned during the sinking of an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland. It premiered at the Tarragon in 1987 and was subsequently produced for radio in English, French, German, Danish, and Swedish.