biography

Drenia is a graduate of the University of the West Indies (Mona) and the Edna Manley School of the Performing Arts (Jamaica, 2002). As a freshman at UWI, her version of Tallawah, staged at the 1999 annual Performing Arts Festival, won awards for Best Director and Best Production from the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts. A playwright and an actor involved in the arts in St. Lucia for over 27 years, her directing credits include several major works: Pappy show Park(1998), Desiree(1999), Revelations (2000), Jesus of Conway (2002), Sarafina (2003) and (2010), Anthem (2004) and Tin day(2006), Urban Drift - the Saint Lucia official dance and musical production done in Trinidad for CARFESTA at Queens Hall, Thumbelina (2009), Esperance: Hope of an Island, commissioned in 2009 to mark the 30th Anniversary of Saint Lucia’s Independence, Navel String done for The World Black Arts Festival in Senegal (2011), A Woman’s Song Book (2018), Three Stool and a Piano Take 2 (2018), and Saint Lucia’s first production directed by a female for CARFESTA XIV “A Little Folk Tale”(2019).

In 2002 Drenia directed the short film By Choice by Chance produced by the Aids Action Foundation and Right-Angle Imaging.  Her work later took her to Boston (2004) directing the Iyanola Experience a multi-media immersion project for the Port Castries Animation Centre. She later wrote and directed the musical Masquerade Master (2007) and wrote the screenplay Koudmen (2008), a short film for children.

Drenia Frederick was the first Artistic Director of the St. Lucia Arts Festival Company, a position which she held for three years (2004-2006). During this time, she played a major role in shaping the annual Kalalu World Music Festival as well as WordAlive a performance poetry event.  She was also the Artistic Director for the Dennery/Mabouya Development Project (European Union) in 2011, taking the lead in developing community-oriented entertainment.

In her work, Drenia Frederick has managed to bridge at least three generations of playwrights, producers, filmmakers, and performers so that she is respected by senior and junior practitioners alike across the creative spectrum in Saint Lucia.  In 2008, she founded the independent theatre group Zenaida Productions, comprised mainly of young students, 85% of whom were female and many of whom have gone on to establish their own careers in production, broadcasting, film, and the creative industries sector.

Lucian’s outstanding young women in 2009, an accolade which acknowledges her considerable experience on stage. She was the only nominee from the Caribbean for the Gilder Coligny International Women in Theatre Award for 2017. Her directing skills have taken her to both regional and international stages, and her style has been described as radical, unique and revisionist.

Her recent work in 2020 has been more centred around her company Moyra Media a business centre around the creative industry, generating content for both television and online platforms including: conceptualizing, scripting, and directing the Virtual Independence launch, Club 42 ten-minute documentaries on enduring businesses in Saint Lucia, Poetry Live Voices of the Underground television series featuring six female poets. In addition, producing the thirty-minute documentary and a five-episode comedic series for the Digicel Play Go platform.

For more than a decade, Drenia Frederick has been avant-garde and visionary; a fact that often put her at odds with the traditional establishment (clearly a good sign in a small, often overly conservative society).  She has been instrumental in the emergence of a whole new cadre of actors, directors and producers, content, working on stage and television and on the tourism entertainment circuit. Her spectrum of social influence and her Business Moyra Media  stretches from rural community groups to creating concepts and content for film,  and commercial and educational media products. Currently, she is a collaborator with Project “C” and is also a master’s student in Media Communications and Digital technology at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California.

Even her most ardent critics would admit that Drenia Frederick and Moyra Media breathes unexpected life into any work and collaborates with other avant-garde creative business with insertions and cross-fertilizations to produce unique products.