Jovanni Sy

Jovanni Sy is a Canadian actor, playwright and theatre director.

Background Of Chinese Filipino descent, he was born in Manila and grew up in Toronto, Ontario after emigrating to Canada with his family in childhood. He studied engineering at the University of Toronto, while active in community theatre as a hobby, but after not being satisfied in his early engineering career he left the profession and decided to pursue acting professionally. principally in stage roles but also in film and television including a regular role as Dr. Donald Chen in the medical drama Side Effects, and an episode of the 2003 short-run drama anthology series The Atwood Stories.

Playwriting and theatre direction He subsequently joined Factory Theatre's Playwrights Lab in 2001, spending three years with the program before joining Tapestry Opera as playwright-in-residence in 2005.

In 2010 he premiered the play A Taste of Empire, in a production directed by Guillermo Verdecchia. The play was a Dora Mavor Moore Award nominee for Best Original Play, Independent Theatre in 2011.

In 2012 he was named artistic director of Gateway Theatre in Vancouver, The play won various awards including a Jessie Richardson Theatre Award for Outstanding Original Script, and a Winnipeg Theatre Award for Outstanding New Work.

Following his time with Gateway Theatre, Sy opted to return to school to pursue an MFA in theatre at the University of Calgary, graduating in 2023.

Salesman in China, a play he cowrote with his wife Leanna Brodie about Arthur Miller's 1983 production of Death of a Salesman in China, premiered at Stratford in 2024.

The Tao of the World, a contemporary Asian Canadian adaptation of William Congreve's 1700 play The Way of the World which was written as his master's thesis play, is slated to receive its first professional staging at Stratford in 2026.