Cole Lewis
Cole Lewis (she/her) is a theatre artist, educator, and Mom. She specializes in creating live performance from design ideas, exploring new modes of storytelling, and fusing technologies to the stage. Her practice includes directing, playwriting, and the design of moving image works. She has an MFA in Directing from Yale School of Drama, is the Co-Artistic Director of Guilty by Association.
Cole teaches acting, directing, script analysis, and new creation. She believes it is a big responsibility to guide the aesthetic standard of an emerging artist and provide the profession with dynamic and original leaders in the field. It is a responsibility she doesn’t take lightly. She empowers her students to reach their full capacity as smart, thinking, citizen-artists. Artists who are keen and empathetic observers of the world. Artists who are deeply curious about all aspects of human nature. Artists who are free from fear. Artists who make and/or perform work that is necessary today. Cole’s students have performed, written, and/or directed at: Shaw Festival, Arts Club, Theatre Calgary, Alberta Theatre Projects, Banff Theatre, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, PuSH Festival, Theatre Centre, Crow’s Theatre. Her students can also be seen performing on Apple TV, The CW, Global TV, CBC Gem, Hallmark, and Lionsgate.
Twice-nominated for Dora Awards, Cole’s artistic practice uses humour, design, and technology, to explore notions of violence, expose questions of bias, and unsettle standard conceptions of ‘truth’. Select credits: Finished writing REFUSE, a seed commission for Stratford Festival. Writing/Directing/Performing the Dora-nominated moving image performance of 1991 for Why Not Theatre’s RISER Projects. Adapting Kyo Maclear’s Virginia Wolf for Geordie Theatre. Co-writing/originating the Direction of the Dora-nominated Keith Richards: The One Woman Show. Directing Canada’s largest wearable art show, STRUTT. Devising/Directing Redshift Music Society’s immersive experience Still Life Continuum at Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre. Upcoming: Continue to develop 2021 with GbA and the support of Playwrights Workshop Montreal for a NYC premiere in 2026. Continue to build The Piñata Project for a Mainspace Gallery Exhibition in 2025. Continue to write The Welfare Diet which was seeded at The Caravan Farm Theatre’s 2024 National Playwright Retreat. Disparate, divergent, and wide-ranging, Cole’s work questions received ideas about identity, violence, and systems of oppression to explore alternative futures.
