Christene Adina Browne

For more than three decades, Christene Browne has produced a wide variety of award-winning productions with subjects as diverse as the welfare system, jazz music, and linguistics. She is currently working on “I See You Sister,” an experimental animation piece that pays tribute to the beauty and tenacity of Black women. She has written screenplays for both feature-length and short films. Her first feature film, Another Planet (1999), the first feature film to be directed and written by a Black woman in Canada, was screened internationally. Her screenplay, Sena, which deals with modern-day slavery, was selected as a finalist for the 2018 Women in Cinema International Screenplay Competition.

In addition to screenplays, she is also a published novelist who has been invited to international book festivals. Her first novel, Two Women, was published in 2013, and her second novel, Philomena (Unloved), was published in 2018 and is currently listed on several Goodreads Readers’ Choice lists. She recently completed her third novel, 2084: The Conversion. It was named a finalist in ECW 2022 Press’s Best New Speculative Novel Contest. In 2020, her storytelling practice expanded to include opera libretti and stage plays. Her first opera, Inertia, a contemplation on death and dying, was commissioned by Loose Tea Music Theatre. She recently completed a new libretto based on the controversial theory that Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas were the same person. Her love of opera was cultivated when she was a film student through the films of Peter Greenaway.