Ellen Ross Stuart - Assistant Stage Manager

Ellen Ross Stuart (Nel) grew up in Stratford, Ontario, surrounded by (eating/sleeping/dreaming) theatre.  Then she turned 12, spent a month in China, and her world got a whole lot wider. 

After four seasons as a child actor at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (specializing as a Macduff child) and a summer at the Blyth Festival, Nel became an avid playwright: her first play won an award of excellence from the Sears Drama Festival, her third brought her to the Tarragon Young Playwrights Unit in Toronto and her eighth won the President’s Prize in Playwriting at York University.  She has now written 16 plays 3 of which were produced by the time she turned 20, and every year since then she’s been lucky enough to have (at least) two plays either produced or read in a Festival.

Part of the original ensemble of Toronto’s Theatre Revolve and actor/writer in five of their productions at venues such as Tarragon, Factory Theatre, Buddies in Bad Time and CanStage, Berkley Street, she also created a short film under the Revolve banner that was screened at the Hysteria Women's Festival.  This summer she enjoyed her second season working for Canopy Theatre, Toronto’s longest-running outdoor performance company.  She is thrilled to be working on her fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh shows for Hart House Theatre –her creative home-- during the 2011/12 season.   

Nel’s other guiding passion is for travel.  In this less theatrical but no less dramatic pursuit she has fought forest fires in South Africa, spent 6 months teaching English to 300 nine year olds in rural China, taken a boat down the Mekong, another through the Amazon basin, canoed down the Lower Zambezi, worked in an orphanage and an animal sanctuary atop a mountain, climbed countless ruins and a sand dune or two, swum under waterfalls, gone caving in Belize, camped on the trek from Cape Town to Nairobi, ridden a camel in the Sahara and amassed hundreds of pages of travel writing (and thousands of photographs), which she fully intends to turn into a book.

Somewhere in the midst of this, she graduated cum laude in Anthropology, began volunteering at the Hospital for Sick Children, and Give Kids the World in Florida and hopes this will lead her to a life where she is able to "do something" that "matters", make theatre, and travel at the same time.

To see some of Nel’s work please see the links below:

Travel Writing

Travel Photography

Novel

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