Judith Thompson
Playwright of The Thrill. Playwright, director, actor and professor of theatre, Judith Thompson is the author of 17 published and produced plays, including The Crackwalker, Lion in the Streets, Perfect Pie, Palace of the End, Sled, Capture Me and Habitat, many of which have been produced all over the world in many languages, and Elektra in Bosnia, performed in Hydra and Athens, Greece, as part of last year’s international Women & War Project. She has also authored two feature films, Perfect Pie and Lost and Delirious, as well as several made-for-TV movies, including Life With Billy and Turning to Stone. Recently she created the play Rare with nine performers with Down Syndrome, which was a Patrons’ Pick and won the Ed Mirvish Entrepreneur Award at the Toronto Fringe Festival and later ran at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts. In 2011 for the Next Theatre Festival she created and directedThe Grace Project: SICK! with 14 youth with self-described disabilities. In 2006 she created body and soul with 14 older women telling their own stories in their own words, which played to sold-out houses at the Young Centre and the Tarragon Theatre and at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. Judith recently formed the Rare Theatre Company which, in partnership with the Young Centre, will create at least three plays over three years featuring full casts with disabilities revealing their world in their words. The first of these plays is Rare; the second will feature a wheelchair-bound cast and the third will feature performers from the Deaf community. Judith Thompson has won the Governor General’s Award twice, the Chalmers, the Dora, the Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts, the Toronto Arts Award, the Canadian Author’s Association Award, the Herbert Whittaker Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and the Amnesty International Award for Freedom of Expression. She received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012. She has been a professor of theatre at the University of Guelph since 1993. She lives in Toronto with her husband, two dogs, two cats and her five children (when they are not at school or in far-away countries teaching English).