Williams will receive the Canadian Screen Awards’ Changemaker Award for her work with Reelworld, a festival and series of professional development initiatives for racially diverse filmmakers
Tonya Williams, the Canadian actor and founder of Reelworld, which she grew from a film festival into a phenomenon, recently unearthed a document from 1987. That’s the year she moved to Los Angeles after stints on the children’s show Polka Dot Door and the CTV sitcom Check It Out!. The document is a list of colleagues she met at auditions and get-togethers.
“If you’re born Black, you’re automatically an activist,” she says. “It’s a given that I’m a changemaker – I’m just doing survival.” In Oshawa, Ont., Williams’s schoolmates were primarily white. Her mother, a registered nurse and midwife, and her father, a lawyer and judge , would often tell her, “What your friends can do, you can’t do,” Williams recalls. “We knew it was unfair. But we also knew that unfair isn’t the reason not to move forward. Unfair means, I need to learn the rules, then navigate around them to get where I need to go.
It worked. After auditioning to play runaway teen Drucilla Winters on the soap opera The Young and the Restless, she got a callback – to play Drucilla’s sister Olivia, a doctor. She stayed for 19 seasons.
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