Kat Sandler

Katherine Sandler is a Canadian playwright and theatre director. She is the co-founder and artistic director of Theatre Brouhaha in Toronto, where she staged a number of her plays. Her notable works include the Dora Mavor Moore Award-winning Mustard, and Yaga, which she also adapted into a television series.

Early life and education Sandler was born in Toronto and grew up in the Cabbagetown neighbourhood. Her mother, Ann MacNaughton, was a screenwriter for Canadian television shows including Traders and E.N.G., and her father, Jerry Sandler, had also worked in the film industry. She attended secondary school at the University of Toronto Schools in the class of 2004. She wrote and directed her own musical as her final school project. She then studied theatre at the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen's University, graduating in 2008.

Career After university, Sandler worked with Theatre Gargantua in Toronto and acted in their productions of Fibber (2008) and Imprints (2011). She considers herself to be primarily a playwright and director, and she has directed many of her own plays. In 2010, Sandler and her Queens University classmate Tom McGee founded Theatre Brouhaha, which she described as "theatre for a younger generation", with "slick, fast-paced plays that are marketed like television". In 2016, she was awarded the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play for Mustard. She had developed the play, about a troubled teenager's imaginary friend, at the Tarragon Theatre's Playwrights Unit. It was recorded and later broadcast on VisionTV.

Sandler was commissioned to write a pair of plays for the Citadel in Edmonton, Alberta, by the theatre's artistic director, Daryl Cloran. In 2019, the two political farces, The Party and The Candidate, were performed simultaneously by the same cast on different stages in the theatre complex.

Yaga, a reimagining of the myth of Baba Yaga, debuted at the Tarragon Theatre in 2019, starring Seana McKenna in multiple roles, including a university professor with "a taste for younger men". The story blends folklore with a whodunit, following a detective investigating the disappearance of a student who interviewed the professor about Baba Yaga. Sandler adapted the play into a television series of the same name for the Canadian streaming service Crave, and she was also the showrunner for production in 2026.

Sandler premiered Wildwoman, a play inspired by the origin story of Beauty and the Beast, at the Soulpepper Theatre in 2023. She adapted the classic children's novel Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery into a play for the Stratford Festival's 2025 season.

Help Yourself

Rock

We Are the Bomb

Will Part of You Can Sleep When You're Dead; directed by Michael Orlando

Sucker

Cockfight

Punch Up

Retreat

Avaricious Contributing writer; directed by Jacquie P.A. Thomas

Big Plans Play by Jeremy Taylor

Late Night

The End of the World Club Collaboration with Dan School of Drama and Music students

Bang Bang

Wildwoman

Big Stuff Co-written with Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus

Anne of Green Gables Based on the novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Television Year Title Credits Notes 2017 Kim's Convenience Writer Season 2, episode 5: "Date Night" Story editor Season 2, 4 episodes 2020 Late Night Hybrid play and TV production 2026 Yaga 8-episode TV series 2018 Limetown Writer Season 2, episode 4: "The Bridge" 2020 Blue Rare Writer Part of The Quarantine Chronicles from CBC's PlayMe 2022 You Can't Get There From Here Volume 2, episode 5: "The Artists"; a Factory Theatre production