Nicole Leona Smith is a writer, theatre creator, director, and producer who splits her time between her homes in Cambridge, Ontario, and St. John's, Newfoundland.

Her work as a playwright has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Shaw Festival, and Canadian Stage. Nicole's most recent play-in-progress, Girls From Away, is a co-creation with Bernardine Stapleton about the hundreds of women who were recruited from central Newfoundland to Cambridge during WWII and was the subject of a national CBC Documentary by Heather Barrett. 

She is co-Artistic Director of the Kitchen Party Theatre Festival (KPTF) in Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland, and founding Artistic Producer of Sonderlust, a theatre collective dedicated to the creation of original work and the staging of women's stories. She's held artistic residencies with the Arts and Culture Centres of Newfoundland and Spark Box Studio, and was recipient of a Metcalf Foundation Performing Arts Internship in Artistic Production in 2017. 

Nicole has a BA in Theatre Studies and Psychology from the University of Guelph and is a recent graduate of Humber School for Writers, where she had the honour of studying under Camilla Gibb. Her writing has been published in a handful of literary journals, and she is the 2021 recipient of the New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Award for Short Fiction for her story Something Really Unbelievable. Nicole is currently at work on her first novel. 

​She is a member of the Playwright's Guild of Canada, the Writer's Union of Canada, and Playwright's Atlantic Resource Centre, and she's directed or assistant directed for Sonderlust, KPTF, Persistence Theatre Company, and the St. John's Shorts. Nicole has served on juries for the Ontario Arts Council, the New Quarterly, and Pat the Dog Theatre Creation, and she sits on the Board of Directors of the Women's Work Festival in St. John's.