Diana Tso is a theatre artist, playwright, storyteller, artist-educator, and Dora award-winning actor. She’s a graduate of the University of Toronto (English Literature) & of Ecole Internationale de Théâtre de Jacques Lecoq in France. Most recently she performed in Modern Times Stage Company’s The Cherry Orchard, Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s Les Misérables, and Stratford Festival’s 2017 season in Bakkhai and The Komagata Maru Incident. Other theatre credits include CanStage/MTC’s Chimerica (Chris Abraham), Pangaea Arts’ Jade in the Coal (Heidi Specht), PENCanada’s TAXI Project (Weyni Mengesha). Film/TV includes The Handmaid’s Tale, In Contempt, XIII2, The Border.

As artistic director of Red Snow Collective, she creates and produces theatre that draws from eastern and western storytelling aesthetics and that empowers the voices of women through theatre/storytelling, re-imagining mythologies through the female perspective. Her play, Red Snow, inspired by the survivors of the Nanking forgotten WWII holocaust, (in partnership with Aluna Theatre/Beatriz Pizano), premiered in Toronto in 2012 and internationally at the Shanghai International Contemporary Theatre Festival in China. In 2016, her play, Comfort, inspired by the resilience of women in war was nominated for the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding composition. Her most recent play, The Monkey Queen, inspired by Wu Cheng’en’s 16 th century epic of the monkey king, is re-imagined through the female warrior perspective and premiered in November 2018.

As a storyteller she created Part One (2010 début at the Toronto Storytelling Festival) and Part Two (2016 début at the Ottawa Storytelling Festival) of her trilogy, Monkey Queen, which has toured to festivals, schools and libraries throughout Ontario and Québec. Diana is co-founder of Birds of a Feather, a storytelling collective, with Rubena Sinha. They have toured to India in their duet storytelling of Monkey Queen and Monkey King Tales at the 2019 Chennai Storytelling Festival.

Her work in community arts includes lead artist with Jumblies Theatre’s where she facilitated theatre workshops for the adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale in Scarborough and lead artist with MabelleArts’ seniors group in the community project Bridge of One Hair. As an artist-in-schools since 2000, Diana develops creative and collective skills for youth to empower their voices through mythology, writing and theatre. She is in currently in the Theatre Faculty at George Brown College.