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Otu Mumbi Tindyebwa

Otu Mumbi Tindyebwa
Otu Mumbi Tindyebwa. Photo by Galit Rodan, The Globe and Mail 15 Oct 2020.

Acclaimed theatre creator and director, Otu Mumbi Tindyebwa was raised in Kenya and Victoria, British Columbia and is currently based in Toronto. She is a graduate of Soulpepper Academy, York University, University of Toronto, and Obsidian Theatre's Mentor/Apprenticeship Program.

Otu won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for her Outstanding Direction of The Brothers Size (Soulpepper Theatre Company, 2019), and has also directed the critically acclaimed plays Trout Stanley by Claudia Dey (Factory Theatre, 2019); Here are the Fragments (The Theatre Centre/The ECT Collective), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Soulpepper, 2018), and Oraltorio: A Theatrical Mixtape (Obsidian/Soulpepper, 2016).

She is the recipient of a Toronto Theatre Critics Award, an Artistic Director's Award (Soulpepper), a Pauline McGibbon Award, a Mallory Gilbert Protégé Award, a Harold Award, and has been twice nominated for the John Hirsch Directing Award.

She is the Founder/Artistic Director of the experimental theatre company IFT (It’s A Freedom Thing) Theatre.

In 2020, Otu became Artistic Director of Obsidian Theatre, when the Covid-19 pandemic was closing theatres across Canada and around the world, and she had to decide whether to wait out the pandemic, or devise a 2021 program. She engaged twenty-one Black playwrights, actors, and directors to celebrate Obsidian’s 21st anniversary; they devised a series of short monologues envisioning the future, called 21 Black Futures. Playwrights included Djanet Sears and Alison Sealy-Smith. In partnership with CBC, these digital productions were seen across Canada by a diverse audience of 65,000, and were available on GEM until February, 2022. When the theatre reopened for live audiences, Otu mounted the violent American revenge play Is God Is, portraying two Black women fighting back against injustice. “Blackout Night” was devised for Black audiences only. In collaboration with The Musical Stage Company, Obsidian staged Dixon Road in High Park in 2020, about Somali immigrants living in Toronto.

Otu actively seeks out collaborations, but also aspires to have a theatre base for Obsidian productions. She believes that “Space is power.” “Until we have our own venue at Obsidian, we cannot be truly free to create the work we want to create, when we want to create it,” she says. “Without having our own space, we have to continue to depend on historically white institutions that own venues to determine where we might fit into their programming agenda.” (quoted from The Globe and Mail 15 Oct 2020).

In order to address the increasing demand for Black theatre practitioners, Obsidian launched “Young, Gifted, and Black for five (non-acting) participants.

Source: Obsidian Theatre website: http://www.obsidiantheatre.com

Profile by Anne Nothof, Athabasca University.

Last updated 2022-06-15