As young as sixteen, Marie-Claude Verdier made her first foray into writing for the stage when her short story, Paradise.com was selected by the Théâtre le Clou to be included in the show Les nouveaux Zurbains série III in 1999. She continued her studies at UQAM's Superior School of Theatre, in Criticism and Playwriting, followed by a Master’s in Dramaturgy at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.
In the fall of 2013, her first play, Je n’y suis plus, was produced at the National Arts Centre’s French Theatre, as part of the biannual festival Zones Théâtrales. The production earned two Rideau Awards. The english translation I'm not here, was produced in London and at the Summer Works Festival in Toronto. In 2016, Maire-Claude's play Nous autres antipodes was nominated for the Gratien-Gélinas award.
During the same year, she begins a new artistic cycle : Entre nous les murs, collaborating with the French stage director Julien Bouffier. Each piece of the project was thought through an immersive system with audio headsets where the audience is installed in the same space as the actors. This search to maintain another relationship between the spectator and the spectacle has led to the imagining of other tools to continue to shift the position of the spectator and extend the moment of the performance experienced in community with other experiences around fiction. The first play of the cycle, Andy's gone, was presented at the Villeneuve en scène festival in 2017, and continues to tour around France, with now more than 200 performances under their belt. The shows La faille and De vos yeux continue the cycle and pursue their tours. The fourth stage is still in creation.
Marie-Claude was the first playwright in residence at the National Archives (BAnQ) for her play, Apparitions, a gothic retelling of Montreal’s history. Her science-fiction play Seeker was presented at the Theatre d'Aujourd'hui, directed by Justin Laramée. The play won the Michel Tremblay Award of the CEAD Foundation, as well as being nominated for the
Governor-General Prize. In 2023, her play Châteaux du ciel was presented at the Denise-Pelletier Theatre, in a direction by Claude Poissant.
Marie-Claude also has a career as a multimedia screenwriter. She graduated from INIS television scriptwriting training. In interactive scriptwriting, she participated in the Village Québécois and Village Parallel projects of Moment Factory.
Marie-Claude pursues an approach as a stage dramatist. She accompanied faithful accomplices on several shows including Christian Lapointe on Sauvageau Sauvageau and Constituons!, Marc Beaupré on the Iliade and Benoît Vermeulen on Bilan. She is also interested in translation from English to French. She recently translated the play Radiant Vermin by British author Philip Ridley.
