Emily Schooley is an award-winning actor, filmmaker, and writer whose globally-influenced women-led work fuses stories of mundane life with inherent magick. While Tkaronto is her current home base, she creates and tours work throughout North America and internationally.
Emily’s projects live at the intersection of subversive narrative storytelling meets the ethos of social impact filmmaking, as seen through a lens of liminality. Her past films have screened internationally, including festivals across North and South America, UK, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Two of her previous projects as writer/director/producer - “Life and the Art of Lying” and “fuck” - were acquired for distribution with the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, and are now available on VOD platforms including Lesflicks and Vucavu. “Life” also won multiple festival awards, including Best LGBT Short (Toronto Short Film Festival 2018), and acknowledgement from the Swedish institute ValueCine for significantly surpassing gender norms on-screen - with over 90% of total screentime and dialogue going to women. Her most recent short "The Sweetest Goodbye" has received a record seven awards and nominations thus far in its festival run.
To date, Emily’s work has also been recognized and supported by organizations including: Panavision, Sunbelt (formerly William F. White), Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Workman Arts, and the Canadian Film Centre. In 2020, she was one of 100 women across Canada selected for the inaugural year of the Banff World Media Festival’s Spark program. In 2023, she was selected as an official Disability Screen Office Delegate for CMPA’s Prime Time conference. Emily is a member of Women in Film & Television Toronto, as well as the founder of the Queer and Trans Actors online casting group.
Outside of filmmaking and performance, Emily has contributed to industry-focused documentaries as an on-camera expert, including “A Big Set of Lungs” (examining the horror genre) and “MeAfterToo” (discussing the MeToo movement). She consults on DEI-related initiatives for organizations including the Canada Media Fund, Documentality, and the Black Screen Office. She hosts panels and leads masterclasses with organizations including ReelAbilities Film Festival and the Canadian Media Guild. Emily has also served on the jury for events including the Female Eye Film Festival, the WIFT Toronto showcase, and the IAWTV Awards.
Emily is also the founder of Laughing Cat Productions, an emerging Toronto-based production company that creates bold, intersectionally inclusive, and forward-thinking women-led stories across a variety of genres and formats.