Laurie Steven is an award-winning director, writer, and founding artistic director of Odyssey Theatre. Her work addresses contemporary issues through a theatrical language that weaves together myth, mask, Commedia dell’Arte, music and dance-theatre. She delights in creating imaginative performances that bring a fresh perspective to the human experience. 

Laurie has created masked adaptations of and directed satires and comedies by Molière, Goldoni, Marivaux, and Benavente, comic fantasies by Gozzi, and the tragicomedies of Giraudoux and García Lorca.

In 1995, she began collaborating with Asian dance-drama choreographers on original work inspired by myth and folktales. This led to groundbreaking productions, including The Wedding, for which Laurie won the Capital Critics’ Circle Best Director award.

Laurie has written scenarios and collaboratively developed plays exploring themes of class conflict, empowerment and social justice, including the madcap comedy Moonlight Mischief, the comic fantasy The Czar’s Daughter-in-Law Was a Frog, the adventure Kamalay, the comic drama Turandot. Her sole-authored plays include A Guy Named Joe, a contemporary social satire about homelessness, and The Girl With No Hands, a dark comic fantasy about a girl who enters her tormented suboncscious to confront her inner demons. Laurie has also co-translated and adapted seven Spanish and French theatre classics.

In 2017, Laurie was awarded an Ontario Arts Council Chalmers Arts Fellowship, leading her to create and direct The Other Path, a podcast series featuring five original fantasy audio dramas set in the contemporary world. 

Laurie has given training in masked performance; Commedia dell’Arte; writing, directing and dramaturgy for physical theatre forms; and artistic directing for independent theatres. She has provided dramaturgy for and directed workshops of more than 30 new plays.

Her current projects include collaborating with members of the Sri Lankan State Dance ensemble on a co-production of The Blue Demon; and launching Odyssey’s digital mask museum.