Fringe Awards Ceremony
August 10th @ 5 pm
Capitol Centre’s Martini Lounge
This year’s Fringe Awards Ceremony will take place on August 10th at 5 pm in the Capitol Centre’s Martini Lounge. We have five awards to give out, three of which will be adjudicated by our amazing 2025 jurors! This year’s jurors are Sadie Berlin, Jennifer Carroll, and Michel Gervais and the three awards they will be handing out are Outstanding Production, Outstanding Original Work, and Jurors’ Choice. You can find out more about each award on our Fringe Awards page or by clicking the button below.
Now let’s meet this year’s jurors!
Sadie Berlin is a Black, queer, and neurodivergent writer of post-dramatic performance texts, a performance artist, an arts leader, and a jurist. She has a B.A. and M.A. in literature and a law degree. In previous incarnations, she has been a legal anthropologist and ethnographer, an offshore finance journalist, and a literary buyer for a bookshop chain in London, U.K.. In theatre, Sadie’s bailiwick consists of developing new modes of creation in different workshop environments. Sadie was a Metcalf Foundation dramaturgy intern for The Lab at the Stratford Festival. She is now a freelance artist with a new focus on directing. She directed “White Taffeta Silk” for TIFT last year and the site-specific piece will be remounted in Toronto in 2026.
Sadie is also participating as one of our 2025 Duality artists. Check out our 2025 Duality page to find out what she will be presenting this summer!
Jennifer Carroll is an actor, producer and stage manager living in North Bay, Ontario. After graduating from the inaugural year of the Canadore College Theatre Arts Program (now Acting for Stage and Screen), she moved to Dublin, Ireland for seven years where she worked with theatre companies focused on developing original work from young Irish writers, including found-space company Come As Soon As You Hear, Broken Doll Productions, and The Talisman Theatre Company.
She has spent the last fifteen years touring an original one-woman show for the Lucy Maud Montgomery Society of Ontario entitled Maud of Leaskdale, chronicling the 15 years of the famed author’s life spent in the remote Ontario countryside. The play is in residence at the Historic Leaskdale Heritage Site, and has toured extensively through Ontario and the Maritimes.
Jennifer is the producer for North Bay based touring company Proscenium Club. She appears in their current production, Happy Jack’s Motel as Stacy, which is performing next in the Capitol Centre’s upcoming season. She most recently produced her first television series, Saint City Sparrows, due to air in Fall 2025 in which she is also appears as Aly. She is also a faculty member for the Acting for Stage and Screen program at Canadore College where her principal focus is on the fundamentals of acting.
Originally from Sturgeon Falls, Michel Gervais is a performance artist, drag queen, DJ and filmmaker. A local and visible activist, Michel is recognized as a leader on queer and rural issues in Northern Ontario, notably being a founding member of West Nipissing Pride, serving as President between 2022 and 2024. In 2022, he participated in the second season of the reality competition Call Me Mother (OutTV) under her alter ego Jenna Seppa, and worked behind the scenes during the previous season. Michel recently founded Jenna Seppa Entertainment, a company that organizes intersectional queer francophone events in rural communities to explore and question current cultural realities, while captivating his audience with his nonsense. Some more notable engagements include being a judge for Sudbury’s 2024 Northern Invasion: Drag Competition, a moderator of a panel of Francophone and Queer authors at the Salon du Livre de l’Outaouais in February 2025, and juror for the Queer North Film Festival for the Best Feature Category in June 2025.
Many thanks, as always, to The Engraving Shoppe for providing this year’s awards plaques.