Nina Lee Aquino is a Filipino-Canadian theatre director who was the founding artistic director of Toronto's fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company.
In 2012 she was appointed artistic director of Toronto's Factory Theatre.[1] After a ten-year tenure at Factory, she was named artistic director of English Theatre at Canada's National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Ontario.[2] [3] Aquino is credited with a string of firsts in Asian Canadian theatre: she organized the first Asian Canadian theatre conference; she edited the first Asian Canadian play anthology, and she co-edited the first book on Asian Canadian theatre.[4] She also currently serves as the president of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT).[5] Aquino has won three Dora Mavor Moore awards and the Toronto Theatre Critics Award.[6]
Over the last decade, Aquino has directed multiple seminal Canadian productions at major Canadian theatre companies including Soulpepper Theatre,[7] Tarragon,[8] and the Shaw Festival.[9]