Stephie Theodora

Stephie Theodora is an award-winning writer born in London, Ontario in Canada. She is well known for being the artistic director and playwright of the Black Hand Theatre Collective which toured across Canada, Europe and Asia. After moving to LA from Berlin, she has written for TV animation shows such as Danger Mouse, Hanazuki, and Littlest Pet Shop. Spending her childhood at the theatre, Stephie attended the Original Kids Theatre Company alongside Rachel McAdams and Amber Marshall. In high school, she was apart of the prestigious Beal Musical Theatre Program. At seventeen her first written play Blow this Popsicle Stand, swept the London One Act Festival winning Best Script, People's Choice, Critics' Choice and Best Actor in both supporting and leading roles. The show went on to win Best Original Script of 2005 at the Theatre Excellence Awards. Stephie was granted funding to remount the show with professional actors and in 2006 the show ran two weeks at the London Fringe Festival. Here, it was scouted by the Prague Fringe Theatre director who invited Stephie and her newly formed theatre company, Black Hand Theatre, to perform in Prague the following year. Also in 2006 Stephie directed and produced P&J The Mock Musical, which won Funniest Show of the 2006 Fringe. In 2007, during her European debut in Prague, Stephie was selected by the Vienna Theatre Project to direct Samuel Beckett's First Love in Vienna. After a summer in Austria, Stephie returned to Ottawa University to study at the department of theatre, apprenticing under theatre director Daniel Mroz and assistant directing with Peter Froehlich. In the summer of 2008, Stephie and her theatre company were invited to perform in the Berlin Lacht Festival in Berlin, Germany. Penning a new play Silkworm, based on her mother's village, Stephie and her theatre company toured in Canada, Prague and Berlin. Silkworm was met with rave reviews and accolades, winning top three of the Prague Fringe Festival of 2008. In October, Artstetten written and directed by Theodora debuted in Ottawa, Canada and later enjoyed a three-week run at the Trans Yapid Festival in Istanbul, Turkey. In spring of 2009 Theodora's The Death of the Good was invited to perform at the Hong Kong MicroFest in Hong Kong, where it enjoyed at two-week run at the National Arts Center. After receiving her BA in Theatre, Theodora relocated to Berlin, Germany where she began creating laboratory theatre workshops in the Atelier Uberall art-space. In 2010, stepping back from the theatre, Stephie moved into the Berlin Mitte art-space, MMX, and here she founded the techno punk band The Polymonsters, in which Theodora was the singer and trumpet player. The band won the 2010 Trashiest Band in Europe prize. Also, in 2010, Stephie joined the Berlin garage band Jimmy Trash and the Gunpowder Temple of Heaven headlining at notable venues such as Festaal Kreuzberg, White Trash Fast Food, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Stephie also played the trumpet for four years in the Humboldt University Big Band. In 2011, Stephie Theodora began hosting, producing and writing Boogie Hour with Stephie Strumpet on the WTNR Radio Network. The show featured lost jazz music of the 1910s to 50s and hosted weekly guests. Also during this time, Stephie DJed weekly in Berlin's clubs and weddings as well as touring Switzerland's jazz club scene. In 2012, Stephie Theodora changed her focus to video games by designing, producing and coding the mobile game Gentrification Monster. The satiric game caught the attention of Berlin Games studio, Wooga, and later this year Stephie began interning at the company and eventually full time. In 2013, she joined, Pearl's Peril, in which she worked on content, designing scenes, story and overseeing the overall quality of the game. Pearl's Peril is in seventeen languages and has been played by over 50 million people. In 2014, Theodora designed and created the app Left4u which was nominated for the prestigious Der Spiegel Social Design Award in Hamburg, Germany. In 2015, Theodora switched her focus to animation, where she produced and wrote the pilot Straight from the Womb with the Talking Animals Animation studio in Berlin. The project was invited to the I.N.S.A.N.E Animation Festival in Malmo, Sweden where the work premiered and Theodora held a talk. In 2016, Stephie Theodora joined the season 2 writing team on the hit kids series Danger Mouse on Netflix and BBC. Later that year she relocated to Los Angeles where she currently resides working in animation television on series such as "Hanazuki" "Littlest Pet Shop" and a new Disney title. She is the daughter the proprietors ofThe Villa Jazz Club where she spent most of her childhood. She is first generation Canadian, her mother being Hungarian and her father from Greece.