Marie Clements

Marie Clements (born January 10, 1962) is a Canadian Métis playwright, performer, director, producer and screenwriter. She studied journalism at Mount Royal College in Calgary, Alberta. During the 1980s, Clements worked as a radio news reporter. As a writer, she has worked in a variety of mediums including film, television, radio, and live performance. Clements’s plays typically consider several overlapping themes, such as racism, sexism, and violence. Her theatrical style is a blending of Aboriginal storytelling, ritual and western theatrical conventions, often reframing authorized Western histories to encourage acknowledgment of alternative narratives.

Clements created Urban Ink Production Society in 2001, an Indigenous and multi-cultural theatre company. Before her 2007 departure, she served as artistic director and produced over a dozen new works for the mainstage. Her play Burning Vision toured nationally and was nominated for the 2002 Governor General Award.

In 2010, Clements founded Working Pajama Lab, which specialized in the story creation and development across film, television, digital media, and live performance. The same year, she was commissioned to create the Aboriginal Pavilion’s closing performance at Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympic Games. This led her to create red diva projects, a production company focused on Indigenous films, live performance, and multi-media works. Their inaugural production, a short film version of the closing performance titled The Road Forward, won Best Music Video at the American Indian Film Festival (AIFF) and the audience award for Best in Show at the Native American Film & Video Festival of the Southeast. Clements’ The Edward Curtis Project received a 2013 PuSh Festival award and eight additional nominations, as well as an Ottawa’s Circle Award.

Clements has found additional success through her self-titled Marie Clements Media production company. The feature-length version of The Road Forward premiered at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, opened the 2017 DOXA Documentary Film Festival and closed the 2018 ImagineNATIVE Film Festival. It received five Leo Awards, an AIFF Best Director Award, and a Writer’s Guild nomination for Best Documentary Screenplay.

Red Snow, a war drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Clements, received multiple accolades. It premiered at the 2019 Vancouver International Film Festival and won the Audience Award for Most Popular Canadian Film. Among other acknowledgements, the project garnered 10 Leo Award nominations along with awards at the Edmonton International Film Festival, the L.A. Skins Festival, and AIFF. Clements herself was nominated for a Directors Guild of Canada Best Director Award for her work on the film.

She has been a playwright in residence at the National Theatre School of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Firehall Arts Centre, and the National Arts Centre. Additionally, she has been writer-in-residence at several Canadian universities, including Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia. The Theatre Research in Canada journal has dedicated a special issue in celebration of Clements’s contribution to Canadian theatre. She won the 2018 WFF Women on Top Award and WIFTTV Spotlight Impact Award. In 2019, Clements received the Telefilm Canada Birks Diamond Tribute to Women In Film.