BIOGRAPHY
Coleen Shirin MacPherson (she/her) is an award-winning director, playwright, actor, and educator. She trained at École Jacques Lecoq in Paris and is the Artistic Director of Open Heart Surgery Theatre, a female-led physical theatre company creating original and devised work that is poetic and experimental.
As a mixed-race artist of Parsi-Indian and Irish-Canadian heritage, intercultural performance resonates deeply with Coleen. Her work explores cross-cultural collaboration, the bending of borders, and the ways theatre can speak to the complexities of the current moment. Her plays include: First Draft (Camden People's Theatre, Mimetic Festival, London UK; Malaki Theatre, Cairo, Egypt); This Is Why We Live (Théâtre de L'Enfumeraie, France; The Theatre Centre, Toronto, Canada; OFF Miłosz Festival, Krakow, Poland; and La MaMa's 58th Season in New York City); Searching for Aimai, which draws on her Parsi-Indian heritage and family history; and Erased (Theatre Passe Muraille). Erased was named on of the Toronto Star's Top Ten Productions of 2024, with critics calling it "unmissable ... [and] one of the most gutsy and original new plays." This play recently was chosen to represent Canada alongside two other plays at the Heidleberger Stückemarkt in Germany.
Coleen has worked with a variety of theatre companies in Canada and internationally and has toured productions to France, Poland, the UK, China, Egypt, Germany, and the US. Coleen is currently developing The Persians, a radical adaptation of Aeschylus, developed in 2025 at the Stratford Festival and at Gros Morne Playwrights' Residency with Playwrights' Workshop Montreal. She is also writing a new solo work inspired by the musical imagination of Daniel Lanois and is a member of Modern Times Stage Company’s Experimental Theatre Troupe.
She has taught Playwriting at the University of Toronto and has been a guest artist at Brock University, Sheridan College, York University, Jiangsu Performing Arts Centre in China, and StudioZat in Cairo, Egypt. Through Open Heart Surgery Theatre, she created and led an internship with York University students focused on developing emerging theatre artists. Coleen won the Ken McDougall Award for Directing and earned an OFFIE nomination through VOILA! Europe for This Is Why We Live. She has worked as an Assistant and Associate Director at the Stratford Festival, most recently as Associate Director of The Winter’s Tale. She is currently the Mainstage Director at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance at the University of Toronto.