April Leung 梁筱彤
Photo by Dahlia Katz
April Siutong Leung (she/her) was born in Tkaronto and raised in Hong Kong since the age of three. While in Hong Kong, she fell in love with the performing arts through school and outside productions, playing roles such as Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, Gabriella from High School Musical, as well as Rusty from Footloose. She returned to Canada and attended the Theatre and Drama Studies program at the University of Toronto and Sheridan College where she graduated with a Honours Bachelors of Arts and an Acting Diploma.
Since then, April has been working with, and at, companies such as Carousel Players, Soulpepper Theatre, and Fu-GEN Theatre Company. As an actor, she is particularly interested in new play development. She has also branched out to playwriting, and has been a part of Factory Theatre’s Foundry Unit and Workroom Residency, Solar Stage’s inaugural Dawning Series, as well as Cahoots Theatre Company’s Hot House Unit. As a playwright, her current projects examine emergent and surveillant technologies, cultural identity and relationships (per)formed and sustained through food, and the complex social hybridity of the Chinese-Canadian community.
April was awarded the Ellen Ross Stuart Opening Doors Award worked with Tarragon Theatre, Hart House Theatre, and Blyth Festival to develop her piece Inside the Claypot Rice. This piece was also a finalist of the Flying Start program at Touchstone Theatre and had a reading in the UK as part of Little Lion Theatre Company’s Stories from Home series.
April is also very happy and honoured to be nominated as part of Cahoots' 30 For 30 Theatremakers, a group of theatre artists who will shape the next 30 years in Canadian theatre. She is the current Associate Artistic Director at Theatre Passe Muraille.
April now travels around Canada for work, and lives with a continued love for food and reading.
Contact
For any TV, Film, Commercial or Voice inquiries, please contact my agent James Scott at Glenn Talent james@glenntalent.ca
“... Chan and [April] Leung’s performances are bravura in their capacity to deliver complex emotion and ideas through their voices alone while switching between characters and languages, all the while remaining unobtrusive so that the focus remains on the screens.”
“Leung goes above and beyond to bring all of the stories’ female characters to life. In one scene, she’s a daydreaming travel agent fantasizing about love, and in the next she’s Sodapop Mah, the bubbly DVD store employee who decides to teach the protagonist how to be Chinese. She exudes power as the moth caretaker, bookends the mall narrative as the sharp-witted and nonchalant bag store owner, and her scene with Chan as the Mah parents, the owners of an electronics store, is one of the play’s high points.”