Ryerson University

Antonia Eugenia "Nia" Vardalos is a Greek-Canadian actress, screenwriter, director, singer and producer. Her most notable work is the 2002 Academy... Award–nominated film My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Vardalos was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba on September 24, 1962. She is the daughter of Greek Canadian parents Doreen, a bookkeeper and homemaker, and Constantine "Gus" Vardalos, a land developer. She attended Shaftesbury High School and Ryerson University. Vardalos married actor Ian Gomez on September 5, 1993 . In 2008, they adopted a daughter, and she wrote a post with advice about the adoption process at The Huffington Post. She became a citizen of the U.S. in 1999. Vardalos had many small roles in television, most notably on The Drew Carey Show and Two Guys and a Girl. She gained overnight success with her movie about a woman's struggle to find love in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which was based on a one-woman show Vardalos had previously written and starred in. The film was a huge critical and commercial success.
more

Christie Blatchford is a Canadian newspaper columnist, journalist and broadcaster. She has published four non-fiction books. Blatchford was born in... Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, and attended North Toronto Collegiate Institute. She worked for the student paper of Ryerson University. She worked as a sports reporter for the Globe and Mail, and as a columnist at the Toronto Star, before moving to the Toronto Sun. She remained at the Sun for almost 20 years. In 1999, she received the National Newspaper Award for column writing. She later moved to take up a columnist's job at The Globe and Mail in 2003. She returned to the National Post in 2011. During four trips to Afghanistan in 2006–07, she reported on the experiences of Canadian soldiers. Based on these experiences, she wrote the book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army. The book went on to garner the 2008 Governor General's Literary Award in Non-fiction.
more

Robert James Sawyer is a Canadian science fiction writer. He has had 21 novels published, and his short fiction has appeared in Analog Science... Fiction and Fact, Amazing Stories, On Spec, Nature, and many anthologies. Sawyer has won over forty awards for his fiction, including the Nebula Award , the Hugo Award , and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award . Sawyer was born in Ottawa and is now a resident of Mississauga. Sawyer's work frequently explores the intersection between science and religion, with rationalism frequently winning out over mysticism . He has a great fondness for paleontology, as evidenced in his Quintaglio Ascension trilogy , about an alien world to which dinosaurs from Earth were transplanted, and his time-travel novel End of an Era.
more

Bruce McDonald is a Canadian film and television director. McDonald was born in Kingston, Ontario. He graduated from the film program at Ryerson... University and has never attended or graduated from Law School. His first movie was The Plunge Murderer, followed by a feature-length zombie flick, Our Glorious Dead, made with his grandfather's super-8 camera and shot on location at his Rexdale, Ontario high school, North Albion Collegiate. The film premiered in the school cafeteria and made $100. His more successful feature films have included Let Me See, Knock Knock, Roadkill , Highway 61 , for which he won Best Director at the highly regarded San Sebastián International Film Festival, Dance Me Outside , Hard Core Logo and Picture Claire . Roadkill won most Outstanding Canadian Film at the Toronto International Film Festival and Hard Core Logo has been frequently ranked amongst the greatest movies ever to come out of Canada. McDonald earned some notoriety when he quipped, while accepting his $25,000 prize from TIFF for Roadkill, that he planned to spend the money on "a big chunk of hash".
more