Finalist: Sally Jones
Rita Davies and Margo Bindhardt Cultural Leadership Award
Actor and director Sally Leilani Jones is founder of Rasik Arts, dedicated to South Asian Theatre, especially contemporary works, and to South Asian theatre practitioners and writers around the world. A long time advocate for diversity in the theatre, Sally directed the first production of Siwze Bansi is Dead in Toronto in 1986. She has taught acting at Erindale College, Queen’s University, and University of Alaska, and is an assessor for the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute’s Arts Fellowship competition.
Sally L. Jones is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Dora Award winning Rasik Arts, the first English-speaking theatre company in North America to devote its programming solely to South Asian works. Rasik is a Hindi word meaning full of feeling or passion, witty, elegant; as well as denoting a connoisseur. Having directed Nagamandala in 1997, Rasik Arts was born when that production was included in the “India: the Living Arts” exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Culture in July 2000.
A long time advocate for diversity in the theatre, Sally directed the first production of Siwze Bansi is Dead in Toronto in 1986. In 1992, she worked with the Multicultural History Society of Ontario to identify artists from the many immigrant groups in Toronto. She has taught acting at Erindale College, Queen’s University and at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, and is an assessor for the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute’s Arts Fellowship competition. Having travelled to India eight times, her most recent visit was in 2007 on a Chalmers Fellowship to do primary research for a solo performance piece on Rabindranath Tagore.
Rasik Arts’ main stage productions have included an English adaptation of Geetanjali Shree’s Umrao; Ek Qatra Khoon—A Drop of Blood an English/Urdu collaboration with Rajasthani actor Ashwatthama JD, who became the first actor of South Asian origin to win the Dora Award for Outstanding Male Performance; Tara by Mahesh Dattani; and Tanika Gupta’s The Waiting Room, besides other activities and staged readings designed to create awareness and promote South Asian performers and writers from around the world. Monthly roundtable readings introduce a wide spectrum of work to participants as they read and discuss the scripts, many not readily available in Canada or newly written works as of yet unpublished.
