Canadian director, actor and filmmaker Robert Lepage was BOTD in 1957. Born and raised in Quebec City, Quebec to a working-class family, he came out as gay in his teens, and studied theatre at the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique du Québec. After studying in Paris with Swiss director Alain Knapp, he returned to Quebec, joining the experimental theatre troupe Théâtre Repère, and appeared in Denys Arcand’s 1987 film Jesus of Montreal with Lothaire Bluteau. He found international success with his 1985 production The Dragons’ Trilogy, a five-and-a-half hour epic of two female cousins over 75 years, employing acrobatics, mime, video projections and actors playing multiple roles. He moved to Ottowa in 1989 to become artistic director of the National Arts Centre’s Théâtre français, staging and starring in Needles and Opium, a drama about artist-filmmaker Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis. In 1992, he was invited to direct Shakespeare‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal National Theatre in London, enraging audiences and critics by setting the action in a mud bath. In 1994, he formed his own production company Ex Machina, achieving international success with marathon-length multi-media productions The Seven Streams of the River Ota, La Face cachée de la lune (The Far Side of the Moon) and La Géometrie des miracles (The Geometry of Miracles). A frequent actor in his own productions, he received critical praise for his playful, perverse portrait of queer writer Hans Christian Andersen in The Andersen Project. In the 1990s, he directed the opera productions of Bluebeard’s Castle, an operatic adaptation of George Orwell‘s novel 1984 and The Rake’s Progress, and wrote and directed the films Le Confessional and Possible Worlds. In 2007, he was invited to restage Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen opera cycle for the New York Metropolitan Opera. His high-concept staging involved a 45-tonne machine made of moving planks, which required structural strengthening to the opera house and infamously malfunctioned on the opening night of Das Rheingold. In recent years his productions have been criticised for cultural insensitivity. In 2018, his Montreal production SLĀV was cancelled after objections over a majority-white cast playing Black slaves. Later that year, his play Kanata was criticised for failing to cast indigenous Canadian actors in a work inspired by their suffering. The recipient of numerous lifetime achievement awards, including the Office of the Order of Canada, he lives and work in Quebec. As of 2008, he was in a relationship with writer and actor Kevin McCoy.