Willow Kean

Willow Kean is a Canadian actor and writer from Wabush, Labrador, based in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. With nearly three decades of work across the province’s stage and screen industries, she drew national attention in 2025 when she landed a leading role in an untitled Netflix series shot in Newfoundland, alongside Josh Hartnett, Mackenzie Davis and Charlie Heaton.

Kean grew up performing in school and community theatre in Labrador West before studying fine arts at Memorial University’s Grenfell campus in Corner Brook, where she earned a BFA in theatre. She has since worked with theatre companies across Newfoundland and Labrador for more than twenty years; among her recent stage credits is the role of Anne in The Father at the LSPU Hall in St. John’s.

Her film and screen work includes the award-winning National Film Board docudrama Hard Light, the feature Away From Everywhere and the short The Death of Winter. As a playwright she has written and co-written works that have toured the province, including the five-woman comedy Supper Club — developed during a remote 2020 Playwrights Atlantic Resource Centre colony and premiered with the Resource Centre for the Arts Theatre Company — as well as iFrancophone and an adaptation of Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever.

Kean is also an accomplished prose writer: she won the Percy Janes First Novel Award in 2018, saw her short story Departures shortlisted for the Cuffer Prize in 2014, and published the novel Eyes in Front When Running in 2023. Her high-profile Netflix casting has brought a fresh wave of interest to one of Newfoundland and Labrador’s most versatile stage-and-screen artists.

She also writes the Substack newsletter The Little Red Chicken, and her stage work has appeared at venues including the Gros Morne Theatre Festival, underlining a career that spans acting, playwriting and prose across Newfoundland and Labrador’s cultural scene.