From a media release:

The Toronto Screenwriting Conference (TSC) is excited to announce this year’s recipients of the Telefilm Canada New Voices Award. The emerging screenwriters were selected from a pool of over 120 applicants Canada-wide. Those receiving the 2018 honours are Davida Aronovitch, Michael Hanley, Erin Hug, Kim Morrison, and Lisa Rose Snow. (See below for bios.) Each winner receives a pass to the TSC and a meeting with representatives from Telefilm Canada.

The Ninth Annual Toronto Screenwriting Conference (TSC) is a two-day weekend event that brings together screen-based industry professionals and offers them advanced level of education and skills development unparalleled by any other screenwriting event on the continent. The conference takes place on June 23 and 24, 2018 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (Conference) and Artscape Sandbox.

This year’s speakers Chip Johannessen (Homeland), Stacy Rukeyser (Unreal), and Ben Watkins (Hand of God) will present Masterclass Lectures at the conference. Returning (by popular demand) are story gurus Carole Kirshner & Corey Mandell, with more programming and speaker announcements to come. Previous conference speakers have included Andrew Stanton (Finding Dory), Moira Walley Beckett (Breaking Bad), Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3), David Webb Peoples (Blade Runner), Tim Long (The Simpsons), Leonard Dick (The Good Wife), Glen Mazzara (The Walking Dead), and Beau Willimon (House of Cards).

Davida Aronovitch is a Toronto-based screenwriter and producer. Since 2012, she has overseen the reboot of the Heritage Minutes series, leading the production of 12 new one-minute vignettes. Davida has collaborated with award-winning filmmakers and writers from across Canada and has helped broaden the Minutes collection with new and diverse stories such as Viola Desmond, Residential Schools, and Lucy Maud Montgomery. Davida’s film and tv projects focus on female-driven stories and explore themes such as culture, technology, motherhood and mental health. Her animated children’s series, Who What Clara Goes to the Internet, follows the adventures of an inquisitive yet anxious young girl who finds a portal into the web and must learn to navigate its potential – and its pitfalls – safely and sanely. Davida holds an M.A. in modern and contemporary art history from the University of Toronto and a B.A. from McGill.

Michael Hanley is an award-winning screenwriter based in Toronto. He is an alumnus of the New York Film Academy and the Writers’ Lab at the Canadian Film Centre. His work has received acclaim at multiple international film festivals, and includes the short films, Tempted by the Fruit of Another (10), Offload (16), Lucas (17) and the feature Learning to Ride (14). He is currently in development on several projects, including his second feature Saltbox, which was listed on the Canadian Film Festival’s It List as well as Leaked, a one-hour dramatic television series.

Erin Hug is a Toronto-based scriptwriter originally from Vermont. She has written several award-winning one-act plays that were produced in the U.S. and Ireland, and was commissioned to write a full-length play for young actors that was produced in Florida and Pennsylvania. Her full-length play, The Big Top, is currently in development with Accidental Theatre in Northern Ireland. In 2009 and 2010, she directed and produced a tour of an all-female storytelling show featuring immigrant women in Sweden. She completed the Fishamble Playwright Mentorship Programme in Ireland in 2013, and the Second City Conservatory Program in 2014. She holds a BS in Scriptwriting from Ithaca College and a MS in International Relations from Linkoping University in Sweden.

Kim Morrison is a writer and story editor living in Toronto. She started her origin story as an Intern, both at a broadcast network (BellMedia), and literary agency (The Characters Talent Agency), before being promoted to Executive Assistant at an independent production company (Prodigy Pictures - Dark Matter, Lost Girl). The variety of these early experiences provided her with an incredibly valuable and holistic understanding of the industry. Determined to get closer to the writers’ room, she took a job as a Showrunner’s Assistant (Rogue) that culminated in performing double duty as their Script Coordinator as well. Since then, she has been a Story/Script Coordinator on 34 episodes of television (Private Eyes, Mary Kills People) and has co-written an episode of season 2B of Private Eyes (217). She is currently in a half-hour comedy development room working as a story editor, and continuing to develop her own projects. Kim is a graduate from the TV Writing & Producing post-grad program at Humber College where she received the Brian Linehan Television Writing & Producing Award for Outstanding Artistic Promise. Previously, she graduated from the University of Waterloo with a BA in Sociology, and too many add-on specializations to count.

Lisa Rose Snow is an award-winning writer/director and performer raised by the ocean and now residing in Toronto. Recent directing credits include Rogue Bridal– a new half hour pilot from Blue Ant Media, Dino Dana (2xMore Sinking Ship Director’s Lab recipient), and the bravoFACTUAL doc Meet Maurice Crosby. LRS can also be found working in writing rooms on shows like Little Dog (CBC) where she co-wrote episode 104, Ten Days in the Valley (ABC), and Frontier (Netflix). She is a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Cineplex Screenwriters Program and Dalhousie University’s Acting Program, and participated in the Reykjavik Film Festival’s Talent Lab, the National Screen Institute’s Drama Prize Program, and AFCOOP’s Film5 Program. In 2013 she received a Women Making Waves Award from WIFT-Atlantic. She’s passionate about stories from underrepresented voices, food, anything woo woo, and kindness.

Get more information on the Toronto Screenwriting Conference, including registration information.