Jojo O’Neil

Jojo O’Neil is a playwright, storyteller, and solo-performer from Markham, Ontario (home of the Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Anishinaabeg peoples), based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Quebec. She graduated with a BFA in Acting from Concordia University before studying Playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada.

Her stories navigate through the schisms of her characters’ inner and outer environments, often using expressionism to explore themes such as madness, intergenerationality, desire, home, and love. She writes impossible, desperate, and dangerous live transformations—necessary attempts to suture the many psychic wounds that plague the worlds of her plays. A provocateur, Jojo is interested in a theatre that can burn images into us, using it as a tool to explore the unanswerable and often horrific, in ways that make us feel not so alone.

Her plays include: The Harpy (solo-play, development funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, staged reading at The Pipeline Reading series, directed by Barry Bilinsky 2024) which won Infinithéâtre’s ‘Write-On-Q’ playwriting competition, Holes (staged reading at the National Theatre School of Canada 2025, dramaturgy by Andrea Romaldi) which will have a reading at Centaur Theatre’s 2026 Winterworks Festival directed by Christopher Morris, AHOY !! (TYA, staged reading with Geordie Theatre 2026, direction and dramaturgy by Dean Patrick Fleming), When The Sun Consumes Us (dramaturgy by Ann-Marie MacDonald), and DREAMHOUSE (solo-play, Concordia University, directed by Laura Quigley 2020). Her play No Jumping is set to premiere at the NTS New Words Festival in April 2026, with dramaturgy by Sky Gilbert.

In 2022, she became a co-founder of performance group Cardinal Collective, producing variety shows, cabarets, and theatre performances in Toronto. Jojo has shared her works in writing and performance across Canada, and internationally in the United States, and in Greece as a Mudhouse Residency alumna in 2024 & 2025.