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Stanley, Sarah Garton

Sarah Garton Stanley
Sarah Garton Stanley

Director, dramaturg, and producer Sarah Garton Stanley was born and raised in Montreal and has split her time between Toronto and Digby County, Nova Scotia. She has a BA (1986) and MA (2013) from Queen’s University, where she is now a Ph.D. candidate. She graduated from Vancouver Film School, and studied with Jacques LeCoq in Paris. In 1985, she founded Baby Grand Theatre in Kingston, and from 1997 to 1999, she was Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times. From 2013 to 2017 she was the founding Artistic Director of spiderwebshow.ca, the first live-to-digital performance hybrid company in Canada. She was Associate Artistic director of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre from 2012 to 2021, and co-founder of the Festival of Live Digital Art in 2018. In September, 2023, she was was appointed vice-president of programming for Arts Commons in Calgary, a multi-venue arts centre.

Sarah Garton Stanley has directed many productions across Canada and abroad. Recent directing credits include Unsafe (Canadian Stage); Out The Window (Luminato/The Theatre Centre); Kill Me Now by Brad Fraser (Manitoba Theatre Centre/ NAC English Theatre); The December Man by Colleen Murphy (NAC 2015); Bunny (Stratford Festival, 2016)); Helen Lawrence (Canadian Stage, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Munich Kammerspiele), and We Keep Coming Back (Jewish Culture Fest, Krakow, Poland and Ashkenaz Festival, Toronto).

In 2020, she and her partner Tracey Erin Smith became co-stewards of Birchdale in Nova Scotia, an historic isolated lodge with fifteen small cabins built in 1911, where they have spent six months of the year, hosting retreats and writing while maintaining their theatre careers (https://birchdalelake.com).

Sarah Garton Stanley was the recipient of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas Elliott Hayes Award, a Manitoba Theatre Centre Award for best direction, and an Honorary Member Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research.

Website: www.sarahgartonstanley.com

Profile by Anne Nothof, Athabasca University.

Last updated 2023-08-31