bio
Jennifer Wynne Webber is a playwright, novelist, and actor based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.
Jennifer's first novel DEFYING GRAVITY was nominated for three Saskatchewan Book Awards, including Book of the Year. Her first play, BESIDE MYSELF, has been produced in Saskatoon and Vancouver and was published in 2001.
Her newest drama, WHITE LIES, (formerly titled Whistling at the Northern Lights) was recently presented as a staged reading in New York at the award-winning Off-Broadway theatre, Urban Stages. That theatre also nominated the play for a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in the fall of 2010. In 2007, an earlier version of the same play was selected by an international jury as one of five new Canadian plays (one of three English-language plays) for a Canadian theatre export program to Germany. Both that play and her comedy, PEACHES AND CREAM, have also been presented at the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre’s Spring Festival of New Plays.
Jennifer's professional acting credits include playing Emma in REAL ESTATE at Centaur Theatre, Montreal (Oct. - Dec., 2005), Valerie in THE WEIR at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver (Oct. 17-Nov. 16, 2002) in a cast featuring Henry Woolf with Susan Williamson directing. She played Joan McCusker in GOLD ON ICE by Geoffrey Ursell in the summer of 2003 and also appeared as a neurosurgeon in an episode of the TV medical drama, BODY AND SOUL. For Saskatoon's Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan Festival, she has played Gertrude in HAMLET, Dol Common in Ben Jonson's THE ALCHEMIST, Mistress Page in MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, and Jacquenetta & Katherine in LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.
Jennifer Wynne Webber &
Bruce Dinsmore (Real Estate, Centaur Theatre, 2005)
In addition to her life as a writer and actor,
Jennifer has an extensive background in television writing and production.
For more than a dozen years, Jennifer worked as a broadcast journalist for
CBC Television and Radio in Edmonton, Calgary and Saskatoon, specializing
in arts journalism and documentaries. Since her CBC days, she has continued
to write and produce a variety of other television features including the
successful pilot for the Cinépost
Films produced series High School Confidential and, most recently,
Shedding
Light on Research, a series of television features about synchrotron
scientists which Jennifer produced for the University of Saskatchewan.
Jennifer is an active member of the Playwrights
Guild of Canada,
having served on its National Council in addition to having served as Vice-President
of the board of Playwrights
Canada Press.
A graduate of the University of
Saskatchewan with a B.A. Honours in History, Jennifer graduated in 2010 with
her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She
is married to abstract painter Jonathan
Forrest.