Artists
Erin Shields – co-Artistic Director - is a founding member of Groundwater Productions through which she creates, develops and produces much of her work. She won the 2011 Governor General's Award for her play If We Were Birds, which began at the SummerWorks Festival and had its professional premiere at Tarragon Theatre. If We Were Birds has been translated into French, German, Italian and Albanian and received numerous productions. The French language premiere (Si les Oiseaux, translated by Maryse Warda) will be produced by Théâtre à Corps Perdu at Théâtre Prospero in Montreal. Erin’s version of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea is a part of The Shaw Festival’s 2015 season. Her play for young audiences, Mistatim, is currently touring internationally with Red Sky Performance and will play to Toronto audiences at YPT in 2016. Other plays include Montparnasse (with Maev Beaty and Andrea Donaldson), which won the Alberta Theatre Projects' Enbridge playRites Award, The Unfortunate Misadventures of Masha Galinski, which toured nationally and The Epic of Gilgamesh. She has been nominated for numerous awards including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the K.M. Hunter Award and five Dora Mavor Moore Awards. She trained as an actor at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in London, England, and then studied English Literature at The University of Toronto. Erin has been a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre since 2010. Upcoming, her play Beautiful Man premieres at Summerworks. Erin lives in Montreal with her husband Gideon and two incredible daughters.
Andrea Donaldson – co-Artistic Director - has worked with Groundwater for many years and took on the role of Co-Artistic Director in 2015. She also is Tarragon Theatre’s Associate Artistic Director. At Tarragon, Andrea has directed numerous workshops as well as Erin Shields’ Soliciting Temptation in the 2013/2014 season and Anna Chatterton’s Within the Glass in the 2015/2016 season. Outside of Tarragon, directing credits include the following Dora-nominated projects: The Atomic Weight of Happiness (Hub 14, The Loop Theatre & UNO Festival), Montparnasse (Theatre Passe Muraille), Offensive Fouls (Theatre Direct), The Unfortunate Misadventures of Masha Galinski (FemFest, UNO Festival, Factory Theatre, Diesel Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace). Andrea has directed A Glimpse of Me with SPiLL Propogation in Gatineau, Erin Shields' Mistatim (international tour) with Red Sky Performance, Elena Belyea’s CLEAVE - New Words Festival at the National Theatre School of Canada, Adam Underwood’s Tyumen, Then at the Neanderthal Festival at The Cultch, The Young Company at The Blyth Festival, Howard Barker’s The Possibilities (SummerWorks), Rob Baker’s Crack (Rhubarb Festival & The Office in Vancouver), as well as her own play Garden (Rhubarb Festival). Andrea trained at the Stratford Festival in the Michael Langham Workshop in Classical Direction, with the SITI Company in NYC, attended Peter Hinton’s Directors’ Masterclass at Magnetic North, and is a graduate of the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and Toronto’s Claude Watson School for the Arts. Andrea was honoured with Stratford’s Jean Gascon Award for Direction, has been nominated for the Pauline McGibbon and John Hirsch Directing Award and has received a Dora Award for Outstanding Performance and Outstanding Production for performing in Theatre Direct’s URGE project And By the Way, Miss. Upcoming: Within the Glass by Anna Chatterton, Janet Wilson Meets the Queen by Beverley Cooper. Andrea is also the Program Director for Nightwood Theatre’s Write From the Hip.
Gideon Arthurs – Artistic Producer – Gideon Arthurs is the CEO of the National Theatre School of Canada (NTS), the only institution in the country entirely devoted to providing professional training in all of the theatre crafts, in both official languages. NTS’s conservatory programs in Acting, Directing, Playwriting, Production and Set and Costume Design help young artists become leaders in the industry. Before joining NTS, Gideon Arthurs served as General Manager of Tarragon Theatre in Toronto for close to three years, where he led several important projects including improvements of the theatre’s equipment and facilities, as well as a major audience engagement program. Before that, he was the Executive Director of the Toronto Fringe Festival during a period that saw the development of a second festival presented by the organization, significant growth of the flagship festival, and the creation of a subsidized rehearsal space for independent artists. He is Past President of STAF, the former Vice-President of TAPA where he also served as Chair of the Audience Working Group, and was a member of the Labour Relations Committee at PACT. He is currently on the board of OFFTA. He is the founding Artistic Producer of Groundwater Productions, and has worked extensively as a teacher and consultant in the field. Most importantly, he is the father of two amazing children and the husband of a genius playwright.