FULL BIO

Jamie Hornsby is an award-winning playwright, performer, composer and photographer. He recently won the David Williamson Award for Excellence in Writing for Australian Theatre, alongside an AWGIE award for Claire Della and the Moon. He has been described in Stage Whispers as “a major voice in Australian playwriting” and The Barefoot Review as “one of the most promising young playwrights in the country today.” His play, because there was fire, was the inaugural commission from Jopuka Productions and won Best New Work at the Newcastle Fringe Awards before embarking on a national tour. Jamie won the 2018 Flinders University/State Theatre Company South Australia Young Playwrights Award for his play, ASCEND, and he was the runner up for the Australian Theatre Festival’s New Play Award for his play, Python, which recently scored a commendation in the Australian Writers’ Guild’s Shane & Cathryn Brennan Award. He was selected as the Australian participant in the Sala Beckett’s International Emerging Playwrights Workshop, where his play, All of It was performed in Catalan to a local audience in Barcelona. Jamie has been commissioned twice more by Jopuka Productions, for Transcendence and The Boys on The Bus, as well as serving as a dramaturg on bogan and the AWGIE-nominated Very Happy Children With Bright and Wonderful Futures. He has written for State Theatre Company South Australia and ActNow Theatre in their Decameron 2.0 project, and his writing appears on Season 2 of New Wave, an audio-theatre podcast.

Jamie is a graduate of the Adelaide College of the Arts as an actor. Jamie has toured metropolitan and regional South Australia with Waxing Lyrical Productions’ Romeo and Juliet. He is a regular performer for Splash Theatre Company and the Ticklish Allsorts, and he starred in the title role in Blinky Bill is On The Loose, a new Australian musical produced by Koala Life/Theatre Bugs. Jamie also appears in season 1 of Firebite by Warwick Thornton and Brendan Fletcher.

He was the inaugural Artist in Residence at Slingsby, alongside Ellen Graham, with whom he co-founded Madness of Two, an exciting new theatre collective. Their show, Claire Della and the Moon, won two AWGIE awards and is gearing up for a national tour. Madness of Two are currently developing Starweaver, an innovative multi-modal theatrical project, which will premiere in 2024.

He recently won the Frank Ford Memorial Young Achiever Award at the 2022 Ruby Awards, South Australia’s biggest arts and culture award ceremony.