Nicole Leona Smith is a writer, theatre creator, director, and producer. She studied theatre at the University of Guelph and her work as a playwright has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), the Shaw Festival, mammalian diving reflex and Canadian Stage. Girls From Away is Nicole’s most recent play-in-progress – a co-creation with Bernardine Stapleton about the hundreds of women who were recruited from Newfoundland to Cambridge during WWII. Nicole has a graduate certificate in creative writing from Humber School for Writers, where she had the honour of studying under Camilla Gibb, and is currently working on her first novel. Nicole's essays and short fiction can be found in The New Quarterly, Textile Magazine, Deathcap, Ember Chasm Review, and others, and her story Something Really Unbelievable recently won the 2021 Peter Hinchcliffe Award for Short Fiction (The New Quarterly). Nicole is also co-founder and co-Artistic Director of the Kitchen Party Theatre Festival (KPTF) in Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland. The inaugural season launched virtually in 2020 and is a partnership between Girl Power Inc., the Gordon Pinsent Centre for the Arts, the town of Grand Falls-Windsor and Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA). Nicole splits her time between her homes in Cambridge, ON, and St. John’s, NL.