Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Biography
Andrew Kushnir is an award-winning playwright, director, and activist who lives in Toronto. He is artistic director of the socially engaged theatre company Project: Humanity, a leading developer of verbatim theatre in Canada. His work has especially been supported by Tarragon Theatre, The Theatre Centre, Theatre Passe Muraille, Summerworks, Canadian Stage, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the Stratford Festival of Canada and Crow’s Theatre. He is a Loran Scholar and the inaugural recipient of the Shevchenko Foundation’s REACH prize.
Andrew’s produced and published plays include The Middle Place, The Gay Heritage Project (with Paul Dunn and Damien Atkins), Small Axe and Freedom Singer (in the recently released book Moving the Centre co-written with Khari Wendell McClelland). His play Towards Youth: a play on radical hope – which premiered in 2019 – is published in a book collaboration with Dr. Kathleen Gallagher entitled Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre and Listening as a Political Alternative. His newest play, The Division, has a production in June 2023 at the Lincoln Center as part of the National Queer Theatre’s Criminal Queerness Festival. Andrew is also the creator and host of This Is Something Else, an acclaimed investigative theatre history podcast series for the Arts Club in Vancouver.
Andrew has directed work for Project: Humanity, Crow’s Theatre, the National Theatre School, Sheridan College, Tarragon Theatre/TMU, The Thousand Islands Playhouse, Buddies in Bad Times, Western Canada Theatre, among others. His production of Freedom Singer toured to 14 cities across Canada in 2017 and 2018. In 2023, he makes his Stratford Festival directorial debut with Casey and Diana, a play about Princess Diana's historic visit to Canada's first stand-alone AIDS hospice. For September 2023, he will direct a Ukrainian play reading series entitled Encountering Ukraine at the Stratford Festival’s Meighen Forum.
A proudly queer Ukrainian-Canadian, he founded the We Support LGBTQ Ukraine Fund which, in its first year, has raised over $120,000 for NGOs and activists meeting the needs of LGBTQ+ Ukrainians trapped or internally displaced by war. lgbtukrainesupport.com
Awards
Toronto Theatre Critics Award Best Production of a Play
Four Dora Award Nominations, One Awarded
Shevchenko Foundation REACH arts residency prize