Yvette Nolan

January 09, 2025

Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) is a playwright, director and dramaturg who works across Turtle Island. Her works include the plays The Art of War, The Unplugging, Annie Mae’s Movement, The Birds (a modern adaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy), The Diviners (with Vern Thiessen), the dance-opera Bearing, the libretto Shawnadithit, and the play-for-film Katharsis. She co-created, with Joel Bernbaum and Lancelot Knight, the verbatim play Reasonable Doubt, about relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan. From 2003-2011, she served as Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. Her book, Medicine Shows, about Indigenous performance in Canada was published by Playwrights Canada Press in 2015, and Performing Indigeneity (co-edited with Ric Knowles) in 2016. She has served on various boards, including the Playwrights Union of Canada, Playwrights Canada Press, accesscopyright, Saskatchewan Association of Theatre Professionals, and Common Weal Community Arts. She recently defended her Master’s thesis, about governance in non-profit theatres, at Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, titled On the Brink: Theatres Search for a Post-Pandemic Model.