{"id":187,"date":"2026-05-02T20:05:29","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T20:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keycon.org\/43\/sonya-ballantyne\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T23:23:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T23:23:21","slug":"sonya-ballantyne","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/keycon.org\/43\/sonya-ballantyne\/","title":{"rendered":"Sonya Ballantyne"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I am a Swampy Cree creative Native based out of Winnipeg, Manitoba.<\/strong>

My work focuses on Indigenous women and girls in non-traditional genres.<\/strong>

I do not write about Indigenous girls of the past, I write about their present and our future.<\/strong>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\nI began my career as a filmmaker when I won the 2014 Gimli Film Festival pitch competition and premiered my winning film \u201cCrash Site\u201d at the same festival in 2015. \u201cCrash Site\u201d has been translated into French and continues to be screened in film festivals and universities throughout the world.
I won the imagineNative short film pitch competition in 2016 for my film \u201cEagle Girl\u201d, which premiered at the 2019 Vancouver International Film Festival.

My short documentary 2019\u2019s \u201cNosisim\u201d won the Doc Manitoba Barry Lank Award for exemplary work in the social awareness \/ social justice film genre at the 2024 Gimli Film Festival.
In 2017, I spoke at TedX Winnipeg with the talk titled \u201cIf I don\u2019t see myself how do I know I exist\u201d, which spoke about the resilience I found in the media I consumed specifically Superman films and the original Star Trek series. Also in 2017, I spoke at We Day Winnipeg on the same topic and opened for Star Trek\u2019s George Takei.

I have been a panelist at San Diego Comic Con (2018) and New York Comic Con (2019) where I spoke on the importance of Indigenous media representation in science fiction and horror. I was named a Barbie Role Model by Mattel to celebrate Barbie\u2019s 60th\u2019s birthday in 2019.
I am a full time freelance writer having written the graphic novels Between the Pipes and Little By Little, for television shows such as CTV Comedy\u2019s Acting Good, YouTube content for Sesame Street, and the hybrid game event The Walking Dead LAST MILE.
For my work on Acting Good and Builder Brothers Dream Factory, I was nominated for a Writers Guild of Canada award for Comedy and Children\u2019s content.

2024\u2019s The Death Tour is my feature documentary debut. Sections of the film screened at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival Docs in Progress and the completed film had its world premiere at the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The Death Tour was nominated for Best Sports Documentary at the 2025 Rockie Awards at the Banff Media Festival. The documentary was the only Canadian nominee in that category.
I\u2019ve conducted numerous workshops for schools and businesses including Seven Oaks School Division, United Way, Connected North, and others.
I\u2019ve also worked as a sensitivity reader and consultant on God of War: Ragnarok and other projects.\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-187","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keycon.org\/43\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keycon.org\/43\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keycon.org\/43\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keycon.org\/43\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keycon.org\/43\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/keycon.org\/43\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":228,"href":"https:\/\/keycon.org\/43\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/187\/revisions\/228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keycon.org\/43\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}