Shaelyn Johnston

Shaelyn Johnston is an award-winning, Ojibwe and Irish-Canadian writer from Vancouver, BC. Her creative practice focuses on the ideas of connection and coming home, explored through characters who are re-connecting with their Indigenous culture and learning about it for the first time, who find comfort in learning from the past, and who are on the long journey of healing from intergenerational trauma.

In 2015, Shaelyn was a recipient of the Governor General's History Award for her short story, "Anishinaabemowin", which placed first in Historica Canada’s Indigenous Arts & Stories Contest. She recently completed the live-action adaptation of the story, funded through Telus STORYHIVE, the Indigenous Screen Office, First People's Cultural Council, and Vancouver Film Studios. The short film is set to hit the festival circuit in Fall 2024.
Shaelyn's animated short film, "The Healing Dance", was one of 30 projects chosen for Telus STORYHIVE’s inaugural Indigenous Storyteller Edition. The film was Shaelyn’s directorial debut and has screened at multiple festivals across Canada and the US, won Best Short Film at the 2021 Weengushk Film Festival, and recently passed 14k views on YouTube. She was also one of five filmmakers chosen to attend the ImagineNATIVE Film Festival in Toronto through the Telus/ImagineNATIVE Film Fellowship in 2019, was selected as a 2020 Netflix Banff Diversity of Voices participant and participated in Whistler Film Festival’s 2021 Indigenous Filmmaker Fellowship and 2023 Screenwriters Lab.

Shaelyn holds a BFA and MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.