Renae Morriseau
Individual
Roles
Director, Musician, WriterBiography
Since the early 1980s, Renae has created art. She works individually and collectively on Indigenous stories with specific cultural practices that shapes the music, live productions, and video creations she has made. These productions include musically directing the Secwepemc community play, Tuwitames, in 2014. Later that year, she was music director with Caravan Farm Theatre’s winter show in the 2014/15 season, Contest of the Winds. In this theatre production, Renae sat down with both Secwepemc and Okanagan language speakers and cultural practitioners to help shape the music and the role she was to perform. In 2017, she was associate director with David Diamond’s forum theatre production on reconciliation called, šxwʔamət (sha-wah-um-it) Home. This play was shown at the Firehall theatre and later toured throughout British Columbia and parts of Alberta in 2018. In 2018, Renae worked as the lead writer, director, singer, and cultural ambassador for the play, Weaving Reconciliation: Our Way. This play was a combination of Canadian theatre and oral traditional storytelling with Indigenous cultural encounters in each place it toured. Weaving Reconciliation: Our Way, was about one family’s residential school healing journey and how cultural practice supported them to face what they have lost. In the spring of 2019, she completed a tour of the musical play, Children of God. She facilitated the talkbacks after each performance that helped Canadian audiences understand the impacts of the Canadian residential school system on survivors. She recently worked on a community theatre project called, Home, Homelessness & the Culture In-between. This nine month theatre project culminated with eight Indigenous women creating their stories about living in the Downtown Eastside. As well, she directed a one-act play called SRO by Brenda Prince, in November, 2019. Renae directed six television episodes for the third season of Quest Out West, an APTN production in 2019. The show’s producer and TV host, Tracey Kim Bonneau had conversations about food sovereignty with various guests and cooked a meal using Indigenous knowledge of land and water. In music, Renae started M’Girl with Sheila Maracle in 2004 and has been singing, producing, and creating songs ever since.Adapted from M’Girl, 2024