Liesl Barrell - Playwright/Director/Producer

Liesl BarrellLiesl is South African/Canadian who has also lived in Singapore and Ethiopia. All this moving about makes her what has become known as a Third Culture Kid (read: recovering expatriate.)

In 2007, Liesl wrote One Night in Berlin to capture the spirit of the expat perspective, the sordid imaginings of Film Noir and her dysfunctional love-hate relationship with the wondrous city she has come to call home (Montreal). She is working on three new theatre projects and a couple of short stories for good measure.

 Liesl's theatre credits include singing about the Platonic forms of love as Diotima in Symposium: The Musical (Fringe 2001) and flirting with a kind of post-apocalyptic, postmodern, Noh-tinged religious exploration as the Dreamer in No Cycle (Fringe 2003). She played Audrey Cameron in Kersti Kass’ Minnie McGee (which first ran at the McGill Drama Festival and was remounted at the Kings Playhouse in PEI), Lady Macbeth in Cahoot’s Macbeth at McGill Players’ Theatre and The Blues Singer in Paid on Both Sides at the Robert Gill theatre in Toronto. She directed Private Lives at McGill Players’ Theatre in 2003, where she completed her honours BA in English.

She graduated with an MA in Drama from the University of Toronto in 2006, where she dramaturged Theatre Archipalego's Just Jazz (an adaptation of Jean Rhys’ short story Let Them Call it Jazz.)

Liesl currently works as Digital Marketing Director at w.illi.am/, a leading digital marketing firm in Montreal. She also writes freelance articles and waxes whimsical on her blog... sporadically.