Artist in Residence

Annie Valentina Named as Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 Summer 2024 Artist in Residence

The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 is pleased to welcome playwright Annie Valentina as their Artist in Residence for summer 2024. Annie Valentina holds a BA in Theatre from Dalhousie University. She served as Artistic Associate of Neptune Theatre from 2018 to 2023, and is also a well-regarded director locally and nationally. She was a 2014 Merritt Award nominee for her play Alien.

A portrait of Annie Valentina smiling at the camera, wearing a black tank top and buzzed hair with a curly bang.
Annie Valentina.

During her residency Annie will be starting work on a new play. Od Dzvezdena Prašina (From Stardust) is an exploration of multi-generational immigrant family dynamics told through Cass, a second-gen Queer Canadian-Macedonian. Through humour, emotional candour and magical realism, the play will engage with topics pertinent to immigrant families – elder care, medical bias, domestic violence and LGBTQ erasure, to name a few.

Annie writes, “Though Od Dzvezdena Prašina (From Stardust) is a fictional story with fictional characters, it draws on experiences very close to home. My own family are multi-generational immigrants of a classic Balkan hodgepodge of identities – my grandmother a Greek émigré to Bulgaria, my mother a Bulgarian émigré to Norway, and myself a queer Bulgarian-Greek-Canadian third (-fourth?) culture kid. Much of my artistic output seeks to illuminate intersections between cultural identities, in both the political and personal sense.”

Supported by TD Bank Group through the TD Ready Commitment Initiative.

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Portrait of artist shalan joudry leaning against a tree and looking into the camera.

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