Monique Mojica (Kuna and Rappahannock) is a playwright, director, & actor based out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She was born in New York City, but came to Canada as founding member of Native Earth Performing Arts.
She has appeared in several films and plays, including Smoke Signals in 1998, and her own stage play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots . [1]
Mojica comes from a long line of theatre practitioners. Her mother, Gloria Miguel, and aunts Muriel Miguel and Lisa Mayo (born Elizabeth Miguel) are the founders of Spiderwoman Theater. Mojica began training in acting and theatre at the age of three and follows many of the traditions of storytelling and theatre creating seen in Spiderwoman's works. [2]
She is also of Jewish ancestry. Jewish–Indigenous hybridity is one of the themes of both David Treuer’s and Mojica's work.
Her most famous plays include Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, Birdwoman and the Suffragettes, and Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milkyway. She has collaborated with Floyd Favel on research and theatre projects that focus on Native performance culture. [3] [4]
From 1983 to 1985 she was artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts, which is Canada's oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. [5] She is currently the artistic director of Chocolate Woman Collective. [6]
Along with Jani Lauzon and Michelle St. John, Mojica co-founded Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble which produced the plays The Scrubbing Project and The Tripple Truth. [7] [8]
Mojica is co-editor of Staging Coyote's Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English with Ric Knowles. She has been nominated for best supporting actress by Native Americans in the Arts for her role in Smoke Signals.
In 2019, Mojica was involved with the launch of Canada's National Arts Centre's Indigenous Theatre. She performed in their first show, The Unnatural and Accidental Women by Metis-Dene playwright Marie Clements. [9]
Tomson Highway is an Indigenous Canadian playwright, novelist, children's author and musician. He is best known for his plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, both of which won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play and the Floyd S. Chalmers Award.
The National Arts Centre (NAC) is a performing arts organisation in Ottawa, Ontario, along the Rideau Canal. It is based in the eponymous National Arts Centre building.
Peter Keleghan is a Canadian actor and writer, perhaps best known for portraying Ben Bellow in the comedy series 18 to Life, Clark Claxton Sr. in the comedy series Billable Hours and Ranger Gord in The Red Green Show. Currently has a recurring role on Murdoch Mysteries as government agent/spy, Terrence Meyers.
René Highway was an Indigenous Canadian dancer and actor of Cree descent from Brochet, Manitoba. He was the brother of playwright Tomson Highway, with whom he frequently collaborated during their time at Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto, and the partner of actor and singer Micah Barnes.
The Servbot, known as Kobun (コブン) in Japan, is a type of fictional sentient robot that appears in an assortment of video games and associated media developed and published by Capcom. The Servbot originated in the 1997 title Mega Man Legends, and appears in all media within the sub-series of the same name. Within series fiction, Servbots are a group of childlike robots who follow their creator, the pirate Tron Bonne, as her loyal but incompetent henchmen. The Servbots serve as a source of comic relief for the majority of their appearances.
Native Earth Performing Arts is a Canadian theatre company located in Toronto, Ontario. Founded in 1982, Native Earth is Canada's oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. Native Earth is dedicated to developing, producing and presenting professional artistic expressions of the Indigenous experience in Canada.
Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing is a play by Canadian writer Tomson Highway (Cree), which premiered in 1989 at Theatre Passe-Muraille in Toronto.
Shirley Cheechoo is a Canadian Cree actress, writer, producer, director, and visual artist, best known for her solo-voice or monodrama play Path With No Moccasins, as well as her work with De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig theatre group. Her first break came in 1985 when she was cast on the CBC's first nations TV series Spirit Bay, and later, in 1997, she found a role on the CBC's TV series The Rez.
Elizabeth Hanna is a Canadian film and television actress and speech language pathologist, most notable for her voice acting work in animated films. She is best known as the voice of Hen in Little Bear.
Kevin Loring is a Canadian playwright and actor. As a playwright, he won the Governor General's Award for English-language drama, the Herman Voaden Playwriting Competition and the Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Script, and was nominated for the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play, for Where the Blood Mixes in 2009. His 2019 play, Thanks for Giving, was short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Drama. In June 2021 Kevin Loring received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Arts.
Spiderwoman Theater is an Indigenous women's performance troupe that blends traditional art forms with Western theater. Named after Spider Grandmother from Hopi mythology, it is the longest running Indigenous theatre company in the United States.
Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) (1961) is a Canadian playwright, director, actor, and educator based out of Saskatchewan, Canada. She was born in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. She has contributed significantly to the creation and performance of Indigenous theatre in Canada.
Michelle St. John is an actress, singer, producer and director who has been involved in creative projects in theatre, film, television and music since the 1980s. Her directorial debut, Colonization Road, is a 2016 feature-length documentary that premiered at imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival.
The Unnatural and Accidental Women is a play by Metis playwright Marie Clements about the disappearance of multiple Indigenous women from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver whose deaths of extremely high blood-alcohol levels were all caused by one man, Gilbert Paul Jordan.
Kim Roberts is a Canadian actress, best known for her roles as Mayor Goodway in Paw Patrol, Greta on The Sinner, Christine in The Handmaids Tale, Marnie in Schitt's Creek, Neeva in The Strain, Gloria in Lucky Seven, Camilla in Being Erica, Mazz in The Doodlebops, Mrs. Arvin in I'm Not There, Deborah in Saw III and Saw IV and Mrs. Bosco in The Cheetah Girls.
Early Native American culture was rich with ceremonies, rituals and storytelling. The stories that inspire Native American theatre have been around for hundreds of years, but did not gain formal recognition by colonial America. This lack of recognition lasted until the 1930s when Lynn Riggs, a playwright of Cherokee descent, brought Native Theatre into the spotlight through the Six Nations Reserve Forest Theatre in Ontario. Through these events, Native Theatre has been introduced to mainstream society and contemporary Native American Theater was born. Indigenous American cultures have been a major aspect of Chicano drama.
The Native American Women Playwrights Archive (NAWPA) is a collection of manuscripts and related items pertaining to Native American women in theater. It was established in 1997 at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and is located in the university's King Library. The archive is a repository for Spiderwoman Theater and contains promotional and personal documents associated with the theater troupe and its members.
Keith Barker is a Canadian playwright and theatre director. The former artistic director of the Native Earth Performing Arts theatre company, he is most noted for his plays The Hours That Remain, an exploration of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and This Is How We Got Here, a play about youth suicide which was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General's Award for English-language drama at the 2018 Governor General's Awards.
Falen Johnson is a Mohawk and Tuscarora playwright and broadcaster from Canada.
Muriel Miguel is a Native American director, choreographer, playwright, actor and educator. She is of Kuna and Rappahannock ancestry and was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1976, Miguel founded the Spiderwoman Theater with her sisters, Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo. The Spiderwoman Theater was the first Native American women's theater troupe to gain international recognition, and remains the longest continuous running Native American female performance group. Miguel has directed nearly all of the Spiderwoman Theater's shows since their debut in 1976, and currently serves as its artistic director.
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