About
Photo by Drew Lyall
Olivia Wheeler is a Dora-award winning queer mixed-race, Chinese Canadian sound designer and composer. Her artistic work spans across Canada with companies from coast to coast and focuses her work on decolonizing performance practices and expectations. Her own creative works include includes her creation and performance design for the installation EVOKE, and the shadow puppetry plays Quest for the Moon, and Hey Girl.
Her sound design work expands and redefines genre (anywhere from operatic metal to kpop to composed soundscapes) with the heart of her designs focusing on the emotional journey of the audience. Theatres she has worked with recently include Stratford, Shaw, Barbican, The Grand Theatre, National Arts Centre, Soulpepper, Factory Theatre, Canadian Stage, and Young People’s Theatre. Most recently she received a Dora for Outstanding Achievement in Design for her sound design for Octet at Crow's Theatre.
Her work in sound design applies her musical background to create original compositions and arrangements for the theatre. Some of her most notable sound design include Witch, The Comeuppance, Alligator Pie, De Profundis: Oscar Wilde in Jail, The Walk-Up (Soulpepper), Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense (Shaw), Forgiveness, Cymbeline (Stratford), The Importance of Being Earnest (Grand), The Secret to Good Tea (Grand/NAC), Love You Forever and More Munsch, The Fixing Girl (YPT), Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Playing Shylock (Canadian Stage), Mary Mary Mary Mary, Octet, The Bidding War (Crow’s), Here Lies Henry, Armadillos (Factory Theatre), Mad Madge (Nightwood), Infinite Life (Coal Mine), Iris Says Goodbye (Mixtape Projects, Toronto Fringe) and Between a Wok and A Hot Pot (Cahoots Theatre).
Her work in set and production designs includes the set and puppet design for Through the Bamboo (Crossroads Theatre), production design for The Fates and Backliners (Theatre SKAM), music and design for The Back Pocket Daughters Present: The Front Lawn Flamingos Concert (STEPS Insiders Artist Project), set design for Testimony of Rain (SATCo), and the conception, design and creation of her immersive installation EVOKE (JCURA Project).
Through the pandemic, she has also started her journey into writing and puppetry. The writing and early creation for her play Hey Girl, which uses puppetry to tell the story of her grandmother's experience through the Second-Sino Japanese War, has been supported by the conVERGE micro-residency (2021) and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her TYA shadow-puppet show Quest for the Moon was first workshopped in 2020 and toured BC in the Fall 2023 with Theatre SKAM and Ontario in the Spring of 2024 and 2025 with WeeFestival.
She has received four award nominations and one award: a Dora nomination for her sound design/composition for The Comeuppance (Soulpepper, 2026), Between a Wok and a Hot Pot (Cahoots, 2023) and nominations for the 2023 and 2026 Pauline McGibbon Emerging Artist Award (OAC), and the Dora Mavor Moore award for Outstanding Achievement in Design for her sound design for Octet at Crow's Theatre (2026)