Kim Senklip Harvey

Kim Senklip Harvey is a proud Syilx, Tsilhqot’in, Ktunaxa, and Dakelh Nations womxn and is a Fire Creator (director / playwright / actor / community member) and Indigenous Cultural Evolutionist.

Past acting highlights include: Rez Sisters, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout, The Laurier Memorial, Salmon Row, the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning play Where the Blood Mixes, the final show of Gordon Tootoosis’s Gordon Winter, and the world premiere of Children of God at the National Arts Centre / Centre national des Arts.

In 2017, Kim participated in the residency Centering Ourselves: Writing in a Racialized Canada, which assembled twenty of Canada’s most exciting PoC writers at the Banff Centre. She recently completed her two-year residency with the National Theatre School of Canada / École nationale de théâtre du Canada in their inaugural Artistic Leadership Residency program. Kim has been shortlisted for the Ontario Arts Foundation’s Gina Wilkinson Prize for her work as a director and has participated in the Banff Playwrights Lab and the Rumble Theatre’s Directors Lab.

In 2018, the play Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story had a three-city world premiere. It won the 2019 Jessie Richardson Award for Significant Artistic Achievement – Outstanding Decolonizing Theatre Practices and Spaces, was the first Indigenous play in the Award’s history to win Best Production, and was the 2019 recipient of the Sydney J. Risk Prize for Outstanding Original Play by an Emerging Playwright.
Kim is invested in community and youth engagement and has worked on the Mayor’s Task Force on Mental Health and Addiction and the City of Vancouver’s Urban Aboriginal Peoples’ Advisory Committee. As Youth Program manager at The Cultch, she created, spearheaded, and fundraised the Indigenous Youth Initiative which focused on increasing the artistic opportunities of young urban Indigenous people in Metro Vancouver.

Kim’s passion for theatre lives within its transformational nature. She believes that storytelling is the most compelling medium to move us to a place where every community member is provided the opportunity to live peacefully.