Keith Barker is a member of the Métis Nation of Ontario. Keith is the director of the Foerster Bernstein New Play Development Program at the Stratford Festival, and the former Artistic Director at Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto.
In 2023, Keith was a recipient of the Johanna Metcalf Prize, in 2020 he received a Dora Mavor Award for Outstanding New Play and the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Carol Bolt Award. Keith was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama in 2018 for his play, This Is How We Got Here. He received a Saskatchewan and Area Theatre Award for Achievement in Playwriting for his play, The Hours That Remain, as well as a Yukon Arts Award for Best Art for Social Change. Keith returned to the stage in 2023, playing Louis Riel in France Koncan’s Women of the Furtrade for the Stratford Festival. Other acting credits include Richard Hannay in Bruce County Playhouse’s The 39 Steps, Cornwall in the National Arts Centre’s Production of King Lear, Roger Hughes in Seeds, and Bernard Smoke in Fury at the Blyth Festival. In 2025 Keith will perform his first one person play, Raised By Women, commissioned and produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, and direct The Art of War by Yvette Nolan at the Stratford Festival.
