Artistic Director

Playwright/Producer, and Artistic Director of Heat Theatre – Wanda Graham

Wanda is an experienced producer, director and administrator. During her tenure as Artistic Director of Stage East Theatre in Halifax she produced 13 shows, including nine new plays, four musicals and nine touring shows, many of them she directed, or wrote. As an actor she is a winner of the Jean A Chalmer’s Award for her work at the Stratford Festival and a Stagedoor Johnnie for work at the Blyth Festival.

Playwright residencies include Stratford Festival, multiple invitations to Banff Playwrights Unit, Playwrights Workshop Montreal and Playwrights Atlantic Retreat, Factory Theatre, Neptune Theatre, Playwrights Workshop Montreal, Tableau d’hôte Montreal, Women’s Work Festival St. John’s, and Mulgrave Road Theatre. Founder and Honourary Lifetime Member of Playwrights’ Atlantic Resource Centre, she was presented with Nova Scotia’s first Established Artist Recognition Award Theatre.

Kill Zone a love story, Part Two of a poetic rendering of military vernacular into a military stress-related trilogy was nominated for a Masterworks Award and invited to international conferences in Boston, Vienna and Stockholm. Brat Part One, premiered at Neptune Theatre. Stealth Strike was invited to Banff and chosen for Dapopo Theatre's One-on-one with Saron Pollock and chamioned by Sharon for prouction out west. 

Her other military-related art includes documentary Military Wives Shut out Shut Up Shut Down which premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival and on CTV Regional and National; screenplay Wall of Silence, which won the Atlantic Film Festival’s $12,000 CBC-Linda Joy prize and long form documentaries Brats: Defying Gravity and Line of Fire: Canada’s Female Soldiers for CBC Radio.

Her Radio Documentary Lost in the Music – the David MacDonald Story was nominated by CBC for an Atlantic Journalism Award. The Heart of Things, a spoken-word opera for actors in fisher vernacular with composer John Plant, will be produced October 2024. Current projects include The Accommodating Muse and Three times seven poems, about composer Arnold Schoenberg with German-Austrian artistic director, actor, puppeteer, Michael Pöllmann; an opera collaboration with composer John Plant invited to Playwrights Atlantic Retreat 2023 and New Work Development with PARC 2024, dramaturg Santiago Guzman, and new play, Human Trafficking for production 2025, with visual artist Curtis Botham.

Check out the announcement of the playwrights for the 2023 PARC Retreat at Mount Allison University!

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Kill Zone: a love story by Wanda Graham. 1 - 28 September 2019 …