The Toronto Fringe Festival is an annual theatre festival, featuring un-juried plays by unknown or well-known artists, taking place in the theatres of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Several productions originally mounted at the Fringe have later been remounted for larger audiences, including the Tony Award-winning musical The Drowsy Chaperone.
Jully Black is a Canadian singer, songwriter and actress. She has collaborated and written for many artists, including Nas, Saukrates, Choclair, Kardinal Offishall, Destiny's Child, and Sean Paul.
Richard Chevolleau is a Jamaican–Canadian actor, best known for playing Augur on Earth: Final Conflict from 1997 to 2002.
Trey Anthony is a British-born Canadian playwright, actor, and producer, best known for her award-winning play and television series Da Kink in My Hair. As a producer, she worked for the Women's Television Network and the Urban Women's Comedy Festival. She founded Trey Anthony Studios, a television and theater production company dedicated to producing new works of theater.
Olive Marjorie Senior is a Jamaican poet, novelist, short story and non-fiction writer based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 by the Institute of Jamaica for her contributions to literature. Senior was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2021.
Lorna Gaye Goodison CD is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer, whose career spans four decades. She is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, previously serving as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017, serving in the role until 2020.
Pamela Claire Mordecai is a Jamaican-born poet, novelist, short story writer, scholar and anthologist who lives in Canada.
Carolyn Cooper CD is a Jamaican author, essayist and literary scholar. She is a former professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. From 1975 to 1980, she was an assistant professor at Atlantic Union College in South Lancaster, Massachusetts. In 1980, she was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies (UWI), where she continued to work until her retirement as a professor in 2017. Also a newspaper journalist, Cooper writes a weekly column for the Sunday Gleaner.
Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or Miss Lou, was a Jamaican poet, folklorist, writer, and educator. Writing and performing her poems in Jamaican Patois or Creole, Bennett worked to preserve the practice of presenting poetry, folk songs and stories in patois, establishing the validity of local languages for literary expression.
Jamaican Canadians are Canadian citizens of Jamaican descent or Jamaican-born permanent residents of Canada. The population, according to Canada's 2021 Census, is 249,070. Jamaican Canadians comprise about 30% of the entire Black Canadian population.
Da Kink in My Hair is a play by Trey Anthony, which debuted at the Toronto Fringe Festival in 2001. The play's central character is Novelette, the Caribbean Canadian owner of Letty's, a Toronto hair salon. Novelette is forced to confront her goals and ideals in life when she receives news that her onetime boyfriend Cedric, who loaned her the money to open the salon, has died and his daughter Verena is demanding repayment of the loan.
Ordena Stephens-Thompson is a Jamaican Canadian actress from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Stephens-Thompson is best known for starring in the Canadian television sitcom Da Kink in My Hair as Novelette "Letty" Campbell. She is sometimes credited as Ordena Stephens.
Annmarie Morais is a Jamaican-Canadian screenwriter best known for writing the film How She Move. She earned a BFA from York University in Film and Video in 1995.
Tessanne Amanda Chin is a Jamaican recording artist, best known for winning Season 5 of NBC's reality TV singing competition The Voice as part of Adam Levine's team. She has opened for artists such as Patti LaBelle, Peabo Bryson and Gladys Knight, and toured for three years with Jimmy Cliff. She is the younger sister of singer Tami Chynn.
Ngozi Paul is a Canadian stage and screen actress, writer, director and producer. She is best known as the creator, executive producer, and actress of Global TV's comedic drama Da Kink in My Hair.
Tim Southam is a Canadian television and film director.
Discrimination based on hair texture, also known as textureism, is a form of social injustice, where afro-textured hair or coarse hair types are viewed negatively, often perceived as "unprofessional", "unattractive", or "unclean".
Eli Goree is a Canadian actor. He is best known for his roles as Quincy in HBO's Ballers, Malik in Da Kink in My Hair (2007–2009), Wells Jaha in the post-apocalyptic drama show The 100 (2014–2017), Joel Goodson in the supernatural horror show Dead of Summer, and Cassius Clay in Regina King's biographical drama film One Night in Miami... (2020). In 2018, he started a recurring role on the CW's TV series Riverdale, where he plays Munroe "Mad Dog" Moore.
Mouna Traoré is a Canadian actress and filmmaker. She is known for her performances in a variety of television series, such as Global TV's Rookie Blue (2012), CBC's Murdoch Mysteries (2015–2018), and Netflix's The Umbrella Academy (2020). Her film work includes the 2017 films The Drop In, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and Brown Girl Begins, directed by Sharon Lewis.
Weyni Mengesha is a Canadian film and theatre director, based in Toronto, Ontario. She is known as the director of the plays da kink in my hair, and Kim's Convenience.
