Honor Ford-Smith

Honor Maria Ford-Smith (born 1951 in Montreal, Quebec) is a Jamaican actress, playwright, scholar, and poet. The daughter of a brown Jamaican mother and an English father, Ford-Smith is sometimes described as "Jamaica white," signalling a person of mixed race who appears white.

Career Ford-Smith, who studied theatre at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was a co-founder and artistic director of Sistren Theatre Collective, a community theatre group of working-class Jamaican women established in 1977. Sistren created its own plays collaboratively, and performed in Jamaica and abroad; the group also worked extensively in community theatre and popular education, particularly around issues affecting women. Sistren played a leading role in the Caribbean women's movement, providing feminist analysis of women's issues in Jamaica and entering into transnational alliances with women's organizations in the Caribbean region, North America, the UK, and Europe.

Ford-Smith was also a member of the Groundwork Theatre Company, created in 1980 as the repertory arm of the Jamaica School of Drama; it became an autonomous company in 1987.

Ford-Smith moved to Toronto in 1991, receiving her doctorate in education from the University of Toronto in 2004. She continues to write, to work in theatre and to teach in Toronto.