Bio

VANESSA MATSUI is a director-writer-actor from Toronto of Japanese descent. She created and stars in the short series Ghost BFF which streamed on Elizabeth Bank’s Whohaha.com and won Best Web Series at the LA Femme International Film Festival, was nominated for Best Web Series at the Austin Film Festival and was nominated for two Canadian Screen Awards in 2019 and has over 5 million views across all platforms. She was selected as a 2019 Sundance New Voices Fellow where she developed the second season of Ghost BFF which launched July 7th via KindaTV. Matsui also co-created Crankytown.ca (NFB), an interactive website about getting your first period, where she wrote and directed award winning short films and received a Gemini nomination for Best Digital Non-Fiction Program. She studied directing at the Sundance Institute with legend Joan Darling and with Gloria Kim in Canada. She attributes her love of story telling to her extensive training in acting and improvisation; she studied the Meisner technique with the late Jaqueline McClintock, studied and performed as an improviser for over 10 years in Montreal most notably at the Just For Laughs Festival with The Bitter End (a serialized, completely improvised sitcom). Select acting credits include roles on Letterkenny (Hulu), Shadowhunters (Freeform), Schitt’s Creek (CBC) and The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu).

Reel/Clips