2025 Lifetime Membership Award Recipient

Djanet Sears

Congratulations to Djanet Sears, winner of this year’s Lifetime Membership Award!

“This groundbreaking playwright delves beautifully into the human condition with a particular focus on Black cultures and stories. Djanet Sears is the ideal candidate for lifetime membership not only because her work but also because she reaches back and helps others create their work to share with an audience” – Marcia Johnson

“Djanet’s contribution to Canadian theatre is undeniable, and in my community (the Black theatre community) she is a living legend!” – Akosua Amo-Adem

“[…] she singlehandedly founded and ran a festival of African Canadian theatre, she mentored young African Canadian artists. And as a professor at the University of Toronto, she is shaping the minds of young artist and theatre practitioners for the future.” – Andrew Moodie

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Djanet Sears is a playwright, director, and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Her work has graced such stages as the National Arts Centre, Mirvish Productions, Tarragon Theatre, Nightwood Theatre, Obsidian Theatre, Black Theatre Workshop, Centaur Theatre, Soulpepper Theatre, the Public Theatre, Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Crossroads Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Grand Theatre, St. Louis Black Repertory, Canadian Stage, and Factory Theatre. Her best-known plays, Harlem Duet and The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, have been widely published. She has been awarded several honours including a Governor General’s Literary Award, an Honorary Doctorate, a Canadian Screenwriting Award, the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, Dora Mavor Moore Awards, a Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, Golden & Ruth Harris Prize, and a Gold Prize at the International Radio Festival of New York. She is a founding member of the Obsidian Theatre Company, and the editor of two anthologies: Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama, Vols. I & II.