Nicholas Koy Santillo
Artistic Director (2026-current)
Nicholas Koy Santillo is a theatre artist and storyteller whose work as an actor, director, producer, writer, fight director and teacher spans more than two decades. His practice is rooted in classical stories and physical performance traditions from Europe and China, and in the belief that these forms remain relevant and powerful methods of storytelling in the digital age.
Koy holds a BFA with a specialization in Theatre Performance from Concordia University and an MA in Classical Acting for the Professional Theatre from LAMDA in the United Kingdom. His thesis ‘The Archetype Wheel’ developed a relational matrix of archetypal forms designed to integrate with Laban movement theory and examined their impact on both performer and audience. He also holds a Beijing Opera Performing Arts Certification from the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts in Beijing and is an Advanced Actor-Combatant with Fight Directors Canada.
Koy has performed in more than fifty stage productions across Canada, the United States, China and the United Kingdom, spanning a wide variety of genres and styles. His work includes contemporary martial-dance productions with Frog in Hand in Mississauga; immersive Shakespeare with Meow Wolf and Incite Shakespeare Company in Santa Fe, New Mexico; translations of contemporary Persian theatre with Nowadays Theatre in Toronto; and traditional Jingju and Wushu performances in Beijing.
As a producer, Koy has built projects and companies that connect cultures through performance. He co-founded and co-led Jingju Canada with Michelle Jiang, which was Canada’s first professional theatre company dedicated to the teaching and performance of traditional Beijing Opera. Through Jingju Canada, Koy performed for cultural and corporate audiences and translated and produced Crossroads, the first full-length English-language production of the traditional Jingju work San Cha Kou (三岔口).
In 2020, Koy founded ACT VI Productions to explore what storytelling means in the 21st century. Working across theatre, film, immersive 360-degree performance, and livestreaming, ACT VI examines the new rhythms of audience attention, new automations of artistic labour, and the changing relationship between performer and audience in the digital age.
Koy has taught and mentored artists in classical text, movement, stage combat, and Beijing Opera in Universities and colleges across Southern Ontario and Quebec. He is passionate about education and mindful of the responsibility of classical artists to pass their knowledge on to future generations. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Paprika Festival.
Beyond theatre, Koy brings more than a decade of nonprofit experience in program evaluation, project management, curriculum design and governance.
As Artistic Director, Koy is committed to building on Odyssey’s forty-year history at the forefront of masked performance in Canada: producing work with technical specificity and cultural responsibility; developing new Canadian plays conceived for mask and movement; and keeping professional training, education and community outreach central to all of Odyssey’s activities.
Michael Sheppard
General Manager (2026-current)
admin@odysseytheatre.ca
Mike Sheppard is an arts leader, producer, director and administrator with more than two decades of experience in theatre production, arts management, community engagement and organizational development.
As General Manager of Odyssey Theatre, Mike works alongside Artistic Director Nicholas Koy Santillo to lead the company into its next chapter, building on Odyssey’s 40-year history while strengthening its operations, expanding its community impact and creating new opportunities for artists and audiences.
Founding Artistic Director: Laurie Steven (1986-2026)
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.
