32 Best Screenplay Genie and Canadian Screen Award winners

Georges-Henri Denys Arcand is a French Canadian film director, screenwriter and producer. His film The Barbarian Invasions won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2004. His films have also been nominated three further times, including two nominations in the same category for The Decline of the American Empire in 1986 and Jesus of Montreal in 1989, becoming the only French-Canadian director in history whose films have received this number of nominations and, subsequently, to have a film win the award. Also for The Barbarian Invasions, he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, losing to Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation.

Nicolas Billon is a Canadian writer. He is best known for his plays The Elephant Song, Iceland, and Butcher.

Gil Courtemanche was a Canadian progressive journalist and novelist in third-world and international politics. He wrote for the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir.

David Paul Cronenberg is a Canadian film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror genre, with his films exploring visceral bodily transformation, infection, technology, and the intertwining of the psychological with the physical. In the first third of his career he explored these themes mostly through horror and science fiction films such as Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983), although his work has since expanded beyond these genres. Cronenberg's films have polarized critics and audiences alike; he has earned critical acclaim and has sparked controversy for his depictions of gore and violence. The Village Voice called him "the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world". His films have won numerous awards, including, for Crash, the Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, a unique award that is distinct from the Jury Prize as it is not given annually, but only at the request of the official jury, who in this case gave the award "for originality, for daring, and for audacity".

Sophie Deraspe is a Canadian director, director of photography, and producer. She is considered one of the leading figures of new Quebec cinema. Her work, which often deals with contemporary art, constantly questions limits, particularly those related to representation, as well as the limits of “reality” and fiction.

Xavier Dolan-Tadros is a Canadian film director, actor, screenwriter, editor, costume designer, and voice actor. He began his career as a child actor in commercials before directing several arthouse feature films. He first received international acclaim in 2009 for his feature film directorial debut, I Killed My Mother, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors' Fortnight section.

Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award. and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Réjean Ducharme was a Canadian novelist and playwright who resided in Montreal. He was known for his reclusive personality and did not appear at any public functions since his first successful book was published in 1966. A common theme of his early work was the rejection of the adult world by children.

Atom Egoyan, is an Armenian-Canadian stage and film director, writer, and producer. Egoyan made his career breakthrough with Exotica (1994), a film set primarily in and around the fictional Exotica strip club. Egoyan's most critically acclaimed film is the drama The Sweet Hereafter (1997), for which he received two Academy Award nominations, and his biggest commercial success is the erotic thriller Chloe (2009).

Bernard Émond is a Québecois and Canadian director, screenwriter, novelist and essayist working in the French-language. He studied anthropology at university and lived for several years in the Canadian north where he worked for the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation. He began his film career making documentaries, later moving to feature-length films, all of which have been shot in Quebec. He is noted for the humanistic, sometimes spiritual depth of his films, in particular his trilogy of feature films based on the three Christian virtues, faith, hope, and charity. Other themes in his work include human dignity and frailty, and cultural loss. He describes himself as an agnostic and a "conservative socialist."

Philippe Falardeau is a French-Canadian film director and screenwriter.

Joan Helen Finnigan was a Canadian writer and poet. She won a Genie Award for Best Screenplay in 1969. She wrote over 30 books, many of them oral histories of the Ottawa Valley.

Thomas "Thom" Fitzgerald is an American-Canadian film and theatre director, screenwriter, playwright and producer.

Kathleen Hepburn is a Canadian screenwriter and film director. She is most noted for her film Never Steady, Never Still, which premiered as a short film in 2015 before being expanded into her feature film debut in 2017. The film received eight Canadian Screen Award nominations at the 6th Canadian Screen Awards in 2018, including Best Picture and a Best Original Screenplay nomination for Hepburn.

Steven Knight is a British screenwriter and film director. Knight wrote the screenplays for the films Closed Circuit, Dirty Pretty Things, and Eastern Promises, and also directed as well as wrote the films Locke and Hummingbird.

Jean-Claude Lauzon was a Canadian filmmaker. Born to a humble family in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Lauzon worked a variety of odd jobs after dropping out of high school. He went on to study film at the Université du Québec à Montréal at the behest of Andre Petrowski, a member of the National Film Board of Canada. His two feature-length films, Night Zoo , and Léolo, established him as one of the most important Canadian directors of his time.

Roger Lemelin, was a Quebec novelist, television writer and essayist.

Robert Lepage, is a Canadian playwright, actor, film director, and stage director.

Daniel MacIvor is a Canadian actor, playwright, theatre director, and film director. He is probably best known for his acting roles in independent films and the sitcom Twitch City.

Don McKellar is a Canadian actor, writer, and filmmaker. He was part of a loosely-affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.

Deepa Mehta, is an Indo-Canadian film director and screenwriter, best known for her Elements Trilogy, Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005).

Brian Moore, was a novelist and screenwriter from Northern Ireland who emigrated to Canada and later lived in the United States. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The Troubles, and has been described as "one of the few genuine masters of the contemporary novel". He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 and the inaugural Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Moore also wrote screenplays and several of his books were made into films.

Kim Nguyen is a Canadian film director and screenwriter, best known for his 2012 film War Witch (Rebelle). The film was the top winner at the 1st Canadian Screen Awards; in addition to being named Best Picture and winning acting awards for two of its stars, Nguyen himself won the awards for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Daniel Mannix Petrie was a Canadian film, television, and stage director who worked in Canada, Hollywood, and the United Kingdom; known for directing grounded human dramas often dealing with taboo subject matter. He was one of several Canadian-born expatriate filmmakers, including Norman Jewison and Sidney J. Furie, to find critical and commercial success overseas in the 1960s due to the limited opportunities in the Canadian film industry at the time. He was the patriarch of the Petrie filmmaking family, with four of his children all working in the film industry.

Sarah Ellen Polley is a Canadian actress, writer, director, producer and political activist. Polley first garnered attention as a child actress for her role as Ramona Quimby in the television series Ramona, based on Beverly Cleary's books. Subsequently this led to her role as Sara Stanley in the Canadian television series Road to Avonlea (1990–1996). She has starred in many feature films, including Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Guinevere (1999), Go (1999), The Weight of Water (2000), My Life Without Me (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Splice (2009), and Mr. Nobody (2009).

Paul Lewis Quarrington was a Canadian novelist, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, musician and educator.

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist whose work, combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent.

Ken Scott is a Canadian screenwriter, actor, director, and comedian. He is best known as a member of the comedy group Les Bizarroïdes with Martin Petit, Stéphane E. Roy and Guy Lévesque, and as screenwriter of the films Seducing Doctor Lewis, The Little Book of Revenge , and Starbuck, as well as television series Le Plateau.

Kari Skogland is a Canadian film director, screenwriter and producer. In 2016, she co-founded independent production company Mad Rabbit.

Jacob Daniel Tierney is a Canadian actor, director, and screenwriter.

Jean-Marc Vallée is a Canadian filmmaker, film editor and screenwriter. After studying film at the Université de Montréal, Vallée went on to make a number of critically acclaimed short films, including Stéréotypes (1991), Les Fleurs magiques (1995), and Les Mots magiques (1998).

Denis Villeneuve is a French Canadian film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is a four-time recipient of the Canadian Screen Award for Best Direction, for Maelström in 2001, Polytechnique in 2009, Incendies in 2011 and Enemy in 2013. The first three of these films also won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Motion Picture, while the latter was awarded the prize for best Canadian film of the year by the Toronto Film Critics Association.