56 Canadian women dramatists and playwrights

Marianne Letitia Ackerman is a Canadian novelist, playwright, and journalist. Mankind and Other Stories of Women, her fifth work of prose fiction, was published by Guernica Editions in 2016. Her play Triplex Nervosa premiered at Centaur Theatre in April 2015. The Triplex Nervosa Trilogy will be published by Guernica in 2020.

Marguerite Martha Allan was the founder of the Montreal Repertory Theatre and co-founder of the Dominion Drama Festival. She loathed amateur theatre, but her energies spearheaded the Canadian Little Theatre Movement at a time when live theatre in Montreal and across Canada was being threatened by the rapid expansion of the American-influenced movie theater. She almost single-handedly laid the groundwork for the development of the professional modern Canadian theatre scene. In 1935, she received the Canadian Drama Award for outstanding service in the development of the Canadian theatre. At the annual Dominion Drama Festival the Martha Allan Trophy is awarded in her memory for the best visual performance. She also wrote three plays: What Fools We Mortals Be; Summer Solstice; and All Of A Summer's Day, that won the Sir Barry Jackson Trophy for the best Canadian play at the Dominion Drama Festival in the early 1930s.

Anne-Marie Alonzo, was a Canadian playwright, poet, novelist, critic and publisher.

Debra Anderson is a Canadian writer, who won the 2009 Dayne Ogilvie Prize from the Writers' Trust of Canada for an emerging lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender writer.

Nina Arsenault is a Canadian performance artist, freelance writer, and former sex trade worker who works in theatre, dance, video, photography and visual art.

Suzanne Aubry is a Canadian novelist, screenwriter and playwright.

Christine Beaulieu is a Canadian actress and playwright. She garnered a Canadian Screen Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress at the 4th Canadian Screen Awards, and a Jutra Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the 18th Jutra Awards, for her performance in Le Mirage.

Carolyn Bennett is a Canadian comedian and writer.

Lisa Codrington is a Canadian character actress and playwright. She is most noted for her role as Gail on the comedy series Letterkenny and her theatrical plays Cast Iron, which was a nominee for the Governor General's Award for English-language drama at the 2006 Governor General's Awards, and Up the Garden Path, which won the Carol Bolt Award in 2016.

Louise Cotnoir is a Canadian writer living in Quebec.

Susan Coyne is a Canadian writer and actress, best known as one of the co-creators and co-stars of the award-winning Slings & Arrows, a TV series which ran 2003–06 about a Canadian Shakespearean theatre company. She has been nominated for four Writers Guild of Canada awards, in 2006 and 2007 and 2015, and won three. She was married to Canadian actor/director Albert Schultz. They have two children.

Sarah Anne Curzon née Vincent was a British-born Canadian poet, journalist, editor, and playwright who was one of "the first women's rights activists and supporters of liberal feminism" in Canada. During her lifetime, she was best known for her closet drama, Laura Secord: The Heroine of 1812, "one of the works that made Laura Secord a household name."

Mazo de la Roche, born Maisie Louise Roche in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, was the author of the Jalna novels, one of the most popular series of books of her time.

Aurore Dessureault-Descôteaux was a writer in Quebec, Canada. She was perhaps best known as the author of the téléroman Entre chien et loup.

Claudia Dey is a Canadian writer, based out of Toronto.

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.

Catherine Dorion is a Canadian politician, who was elected to the National Assembly of Quebec in the 2018 provincial election. She represents the electoral district of Taschereau as a member of Québec solidaire (QS). Dorion is aligned with Option nationale, a pro-independence faction that is a "collective" within QS.

Carole Fréchette is an award-winning Canadian playwright. She won the Siminovitch Prize in 2002. To date she has written more than a dozen plays including The Four Lives of Marie, The Seven Days of Simon Labrosse, Helen's Necklace, John and Beatrice, The Little Room at the Top of the Stairs, and most recently: Thinking of Yu.

Lorena Gale was a Canadian actress, playwright and theatre director. She was active onstage and in films and television since the 1980s. She also authored two award-winning plays, Angélique and Je me souviens.

Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant,, née Young, was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays.

Rachel Graton is a Canadian playwright and actress from Quebec. She is most noted for her play La nuit du 4 au 5, which won the Prix Gratien-Gélinas in 2017 and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for French-language drama at the 2019 Governor General's Awards.

Abby Hagyard is a Canadian television actress and celebrity MC/speaker. The multi-talented entertainer, voice artist, and comedian, best known for her 9 years on Nickelodeon's sketch comedy television series You Can't Do That on Television and for her variety of voices on animated series The Care Bears and The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin.

Jordan Hall is a Canadian writer, playwright and web series creator, best known for creating the award-winning LGBT web series Carmilla.

Katherine Emily "Kate" Hewlett is a Canadian film, television and stage actress and producer.

Margo Gwendolyn Kane is a Cree-Saulteaux performing artist and writer known for her solo-voice or monodrama works Moonlodge and Confessions of an Indian Cowboy, as well as her work with Full Circle First Nations Performance.

Marie Laberge is a Quebec actress, educator and writer.

Rosa Labordé is a Canadian playwright, screenwriter, director and actress. She is playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre and Aluna Theatre. Her play Léo was shortlisted for the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play and the Governor General's Award for English-language drama. In 2012 she received the KM Hunter Artist's Award for Theatre. In 2016 she wrote the first two episodes of the second season of HBO Canada's Sensitive Skin.

Ann Lambert is a Montreal-based Canadian playwright and author. Her plays include Force of Circumstance, Parallel Lines and Very Heaven. Her debut novel, The Birds That Stay, was published in 2019. She also teaches at Dawson College.

Rina Lasnier, was a Québécois poet. Born in St-Grégoire d'Iberville-Mont-Saint-Grégoire, Quebec, she attended Collège Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Université de Montréal. Although she was the author of several plays, including Féerie indienne, she is chiefly remembered as a poet.

Suzanne Lebeau is a Quebec actor and writer.

Wendy Lill is a Canadian playwright, screenwriter and radio dramatist who served as an NDP Member of Parliament from 1997 to 2004. Her stage plays have been performed extensively in theatres across Canada as well as internationally in such countries as Scotland, Denmark and Germany. Many of the plays explore the divide between the powerful and the oppressed, exploring, for example, the racism and abuse suffered by Canada's indigenous peoples, the plight of the handicapped, child sexual abuse and the struggle for women's rights. Four of her plays were nominated for Governor General's Awards. Sisters, which dramatizes the human devastation caused by a convent-run, native residential school, received the Labatt's Canadian Play Award at the Newfoundland and Labrador Drama Festival. Lill's adaptation of Sisters for television earned her a Gemini Award in 1992.

Ann-Marie MacDonald is a Canadian playwright, author, actress, and broadcast host who lives in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. MacDonald is the daughter of a member of Canada's military; she was born at an air force base near Baden-Baden, West Germany. She is of partial Lebanese descent through her mother.

Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, born Isabel Ecclestone Macpherson, was a Canadian writer.

Antonine Maillet, is an Acadian novelist, playwright, and scholar. She was born in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada.

Barbara March was a Canadian actress best known for her portrayal of the Star Trek character Lursa, one of the Duras sisters. She appeared as Lursa in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek Generations.

Joséphine Marchand-Dandurand was a journalist, writer and feminist activist in Quebec.

Tanya Marquardt is a memoirist, performer, and writer living in Vancouver, British Columbia and Brooklyn, New York. Her plays and performances have toured throughout the US and Canada, her essays have been published in Medium, Huffpost UK, Plentitude Magazine, SpiderWeb Performance, and Dance Central and her play Transmission was published in the Canadian Theatre Review. Marquardt's first book Stray: Memoir of a Runaway was published by Little A in September 2018 and named a 2018 Best Queer History and Bio Pic by LGBTQ magazine The Advocate, who described Marquardt as "a compelling voice…[able to] embrace her own vulnerabilities and heal the wounds of the past as she forges ahead into adulthood."

Catherine Mavrikakis is a Canadian academic and award-winning writer living in Quebec.

Andrée A. Michaud is a Canadian novelist and playwright from Quebec. She is a two-time winner of the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction, for Le ravissement at the 2001 Governor General's Awards and for Bondrée at the 2014 Governor General's Awards, and won the Prix Ringuet in 2007 for Mirror Lake. Boundary, translated by Donald Winkler, has been longlisted for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Pauline Michel is a Canadian novelist, poet, playwright, songwriter and screenwriter.

Fawzia Mirza is a Pakistani-Canadian film and television actress, writer, producer and comedian. She is known for her works such as web series Kam Kardashian, Brown Girl Problems and the film Signature Move (2017).

Grace Helen Mowat was a Canadian artist and writer living in New Brunswick.

Rose Napoli is a Canadian playwright and actor. Napoli is an alumnus of Nightwood Theatre's Write From the Hip Program where she developed her play Lo.

Amanda Parris is a Canadian broadcaster and writer. An arts reporter and producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she hosts the CBC Television series Exhibitionists, The Filmmakers and From the Vaults, and the CBC Music radio series Marvin's Room. She was cohost with Tom Power of the 2016 Polaris Music Prize ceremony. She writes the weekly column Black Light for CBC Arts.

Evalyn Parry is a Canadian theatre maker and singer-songwriter. She grew up in Toronto, Ontario in the Kensington Market neighborhood. Her music combines elements of spoken word and folk.

Soraya Peerbaye is a Canadian writer. She was a shortlisted nominee for the Gerald Lampert Award in 2010 for her poetry collection Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names, and for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016 for Tell: poems for a girlhood.

Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall, was a Canadian writer who was born in England but lived in Canada from the time she was seven. She was once "thought to be the best Canadian poet of her generation."

Marie-Colombe Robichaud is a Canadian writer living in Nova Scotia. Her work concerns itself with preserving the Acadian language and culture.

Lorraine Christine Segato is a Canadian pop singer-songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist for and a principal songwriter of new wave and pop rock group The Parachute Club, with which she continues to perform.

Cordelia Strube is a Canadian playwright and novelist.

Mariko Tamaki is a Canadian artist and writer. She is known for her graphic novels Skim, Emiko Superstar, and This One Summer, and for several prose works of fiction and non-fiction. In 2016 she began writing for both Marvel and DC Comics. She has twice been named a runner-up for the Michael L. Printz Award.

Lillian Beynon Thomas was a Canadian journalist and feminist.

Kristen Thomson is a Canadian actress and playwright.

Priscila Uppal was a Canadian poet, novelist, fiction writer, and playwright.

Jean Yoon is an American-born Canadian actress and writer of Korean descent. Yoon is best known for originating the role of family matriarch Umma in the 2011 play Kim's Convenience and in the award-winning CBC Television series adapted from the play, for which she won an ACTRA Award and received two Canadian Screen Award nominations.

d’bi.young anitafrika is a Jamaican-Canadian feminist dub poet and activist. Her work includes theatrical performances, four published collections of poetry, twelve plays, and seven albums.