Catherine Hernandez

Catherine Hernandez is a proud queer woman of colour, radical mother, theatre practitioner, award-winning author, and the Artistic Director of b current performing arts. She is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Indian heritage and she is married into the Navajo Nation. Her one-woman show, The Femme Playlist, premiered at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in 2014 as part of the afterRock Play Series co-produced by b current, Eventual Ashes and Sulong Theatre. Her other plays include Singkil (fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company in association with Factory Theatre), Eating with Lola (Sulong Theatre and Next Stage Festival), Kilt Pins (Sulong Theatre) and Future Folk (collectively written by the Sulong Theatre Collective, produced by Theatre Passe Muraille). She has served playwright residencies at Theatre Passe Muraille, Carlos Bulosan Theatre, Shaw Festival Theatre, Blyth Festival Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Nightswimming Theatre. Her children’s book, M is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book, was published by Flamingo Rampant and her plays Kilt Pins, Singkil, The Femme Playlist and I Cannot Lie to the Stars that Made Me were published by Playwright’s Canada Press. Catherine’s first full-length fiction, Scarborough, won the Jim Wong-Chu Award for the unpublished manuscript, was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award, Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, Evergreen Forest of Reading Award, Trillium Book Award and longlisted for Canada Reads. Scarborough made the “best of 2017” lists for The Globe and Mail, National Post, Quill and Quire and CBC Books. Catherine was named one of 17 Writers to Watch by CBC Books. She has released her second children’s book, I Promise (Arsenal Pulp Press 2019), is working on her second novel Crosshairs (Harper Collins Canada 2020), her third novel PSW (Harper Collins Canada 2022) and the screenplay of Scarborough (Compy Films, Telefilm Canada and Reel Asian Film Festival).

Catherine is a DD 2006 short form alum and worked with Rabindranath Maharaj