Jennifer Wynne Webber is an award-winning playwright, who has also worked as a television journalist, professional actor, dramaturge, and video producer. Jennifer enjoys writing in a variety of genres: she’s the author of one novel, multiple plays, and is currently at work developing new projects. She has lived and worked across Canada.
Jennifer’s play, WITH GLOWING HEARTS: How Ordinary Women Worked Together to Change the World (And Did) is the inspiring true story of a group of Canadian miners’ wives who came together to fight for better working conditions for their husbands and who ended up on a remarkable journey to better the world around them. It has played at Dancing Sky Theatre in Saskatchewan, at Vancouver Island’s TheatreOne, and it has also been presented as a staged reading in New York at the Off-Broadway Obie Award-winning theatre Urban Stages. WITH GLOWING HEARTS was published by Scirocco Drama. It was also named “Outstanding Original Script” at the 2019 SATAwards, where Dancing Sky Theatre’s production of the play also won for “Outstanding Production.”
Her very first play, BESIDE MYSELF, is about a witty young theoretical physicist who abandons her old life (and all solid ground) when she moves out to the west coast to live on a sailboat after the death of her husband. It was published by Scirocco Drama in 2001 and praised for being “smart, funny and touching,” “impassioned and intelligent,” and for demonstrating “courage and originality.”
In 2014, her drama WHITE LIES (WHISTLING AT THE NORTHERN LIGHTS) about a young woman who discovers uncomfortable truths about her life, was published by Ryga: A Journal of Provocations in 2014. That play had also been presented as a staged reading in New York at the Obie Award-winning Off-Broadway theatre Urban Stages in 2010. Urban Stages Artistic Director Frances Hill subsequently nominated the play for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. An earlier version of the play was also selected as one of the five top new plays from Canada (and one of the top three English-language plays) for Germany’s Neue Theaterstücke aus Kanada in 2007, the Berlin-based jury calling it a “sophisticated psychological thriller.”
Jennifer’s novel DEFYING GRAVITY, is about a television news producer who finds herself on a life-changing road trip through the Canadian Rockies. It was published by Coteau Books in 2000 and was nominated for three Saskatchewan Book Awards, including Book of the Year — the juries praising it for being “intelligent,” and “bold” and “an impressive debut” with a “deft sense of character that is made visible in gesture and dialogue that involve both irony and depth.”
In addition to writing plays and fiction, Jennifer also has a solid background in television writing and production. She studied TV writing and screenwriting with Sara Graefe and Sioux Browning at U.B.C. while working on her M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She subsequently had various projects optioned. Several years ago, Jennifer worked with Angel Entertainment to help develop new television series springboards and bibles. Then, again more recently, in addition to her playwriting, Jennifer has been developing her own new concepts for original television series and writing pilot scripts.
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 those days, she has continued to video features, sometimes while working in other jobs, such as when she worked for the University of Saskatchewan in Research Communications; there, she produced, Shedding Light on Research, a series about synchrotron scientists for the University of Saskatchewan.
More recently, Jennifer has produced videos such as these for the Nanaimo Art Gallery: “Supernatural Eagle Bringing the Sun Back to the World” and “Boarder X.” She has also produced personal history videos through her company YOUR STORY SERVICES.
With her extensive background in journalism, Jennifer is also a busy freelance researcher. Her research gigs include working in the writers’ room for the CBC television drama, CORONER, as well as academic research for projects such as Dr. Elizabeth Quinlan’s 1958 Inco Strike Project for the University of Saskatchewan.
Jennifer also spent many years as a professional actor, performing in theatres across Canada in roles ranging from Valerie in THE WEIR (Arts Club Theatre, Vancouver), Rose in DANCELAND (Garry Theatre, Calgary), Emma in REAL ESTATE (Centaur Theatre, Montreal), to Gertrude in HAMLET, Mistress Page in MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, Dol Common in THE ALCHEMIST, and Jacquenetta and Katherine in LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST (Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan, Saskatoon). Never that keen on TV or film auditions, she still managed to land a handful of small film and television roles over the years, such as playing a Swiss newscaster in THE LOST DAUGHTER, a neurosurgeon in the TV medical drama, BODY AND SOUL, and a 1960s reporter in MAXWELL’S DEMON.
Jennifer is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada and has 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.
Jennifer is represented by Doreen Holmes, Integral Artists.
