Justin Neal

January 09, 2025

After fifteen years juggling marketing and editorial production day jobs in San Francisco & New York with amateur theatre at night, Justin Neal relocated to his family’s traditional Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) lands to earn a Joint Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Theatre from the University of British Columbia. Founding Holy Crow Arts in 2020, his plays So Damn Proud and Keepers of the Salish Sea have premiered through funding awarded by First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Squamish Nation, BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and the City of Vancouver, among others. Neal’s screenplays have placed in dozens of festival competitions and writing programs across Turtle Island and have received development funds from Telefilm, the Indigenous Screen Office, and Creative BC. He is an alumnus of the Toronto-based Canadian Film Centre’s Norman Jewison Film Program Writers’ Lab and is a 2024-25 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University.