Jillian is an award-winning director from St. John’s, Newfoundland and founder of Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland. Jillian has directed and taught across Canada and internationally. She received her BFA in Theatre from York University and was awarded Honorary Doctorates of Letters from both Memorial University and York University. She was the winner of the Siminovitch Prize for Directing in 2004 and the Canada Council’s John Hirsch Prize in 1997. Jillian assumed her role as NAC English Theatre Artistic Director in August 2012, and her productions at the NAC have included The Neverending Story, Between Breaths, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, A Christmas Carol, Twelfth Night, Metamorphoses: Based on the Myths of Ovid, Tartuffe, Oil and Water and Alice Through the Looking-Glass. She also directed Bakkhai, The Diary of Anne Frank and As You Like It for the Stratford Festival. Tempting Providence, her collaboration with Robert Chafe for Theatre Newfoundland Labrador, toured internationally for 12 years and will be the inaugural production at the launch of the Nurse Myra Bennett Theatre in Cow Head, Newfoundland this summer.