Back to authors index
Maggie MacDonald
Maggie MacDonald is an award-winning playwright, visual artist and musician with the critically acclaimed bands The Hidden Cameras and The Republic of Safety.
For the last five years, MacDonald has been a major player in Toronto’s indie rock community. With the Barcelona Pavillion, she won the NOW Magazine’s Best New Band Award in 2003 and recorded a Peel session. She currently plays keyboards for the art-band The Hidden Cameras, recently featured in Rolling Stone, The Globe & Mail and NME magazine, now signed with England’s Rough Trade records and touring internationally. MacDonald’s new musical project, The Republic of Safety, are purveyors of “bleeding heart aggro dance nation,” blending politics, lust and hardcore.
MacDonald is also an accomplished playwright. Her play, A Clockwork Gorbachev, won the Robertson Davies Award for Playwriting in 2001 and the Hart House Play Writing Award in 2000. The Rat King, best described as a agit-prop-pataphysical stage musical, was recently presented as a full-length public reading, with slides and songs at the Cameron House in Toronto as part of 2005 May Day festivities.
Maggie MacDonald has exhibited her art at numerous locations in Toronto and her illustrations and comics have been published in The Globe & Mail and Lola Magazine. Her writing has been published in Fireweed, Peace Magazine, and Broken Pencil.
As a teenager growing up in Cornwall, Ontario, she was dubbed the “punk rock valedictorian”. She made a splash in the late nineties ‘zine scene, self-publishing the political Saucy magazine. During her time as student trustee on her local school board, she organized punk concerts and a school-walk out to protest Tory education policies. At the tender age of twenty Maggie MacDonald was an NDP candidate in the 1999 federal election.
You can read more about Maggie MacDonald here: