Our Visionaries

  • A portrait of Rodney Diverlus, a Black person. They are masculine-presenting, with a faded haircut and well-manicured beard and mustache. They are wearing a floral button up shirt, rings on their fingers, and are facing the camera with a soft smile.

    Rodney Diverlus

    Rodney Diverlus (they/them) is a Haitian-Canadian multi-hyphenate artmaker and producer whose work spans the realms of film, digital media, and live performance (theatre, dance, installation, multidisciplinary performance). Rodney is Producer of BURN, BURNED (2019), and the digital series INHALE/EXHALE (2020), HERE/AFTER (in post). They have performed, choreographed, and directed works across many mediums; their work flaunts emergent representations of Blackness, queerness, diasporic life, and freedom.

    Rodney moonlights as an artivist and community activator. They are a co-founder of Black Lives Matter—Canada, the Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism, and author of bestseller “Until We are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada.

  • A portrait of Sandy Hudson, a smiling Black woman with a shoulder-length afro wearing a black turtleneck, a gold coloured necklace, and medium-wash blue jeans. She is sitting angled away from the photographer, to the viewer's left.

    Sandy Hudson

    A multi-talented creative, Sandy is best known for her work bringing the Black Lives Matter movement to Canada and as co-host and producer of the Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast. Named one of the most powerful Canadians by Maclean’s Magazine and one of Toronto’s most influential people by Toronto Life, Sandy is also a filmmaker, a lawyer, and a best-selling author. Sandy co-founded the Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism, a Black-owned and operated art-based community centre in Toronto.

    Sandy is co-Executive Producer on Studio 112, Northwood Entertainment and Ugly Duck Production’s BLACK LIFE: UNTOLD STORIES (2023), a forthcoming eight-part CBC documentary series about Black history in Canada, premiering at TIFF in 2023.

Our Mission

We are on a mission to create great film, TV, and theatre. Our stories shift culture, push storytelling traditions forward, and start conversations. We also aim to create human-centred workplaces that value and acknowledge the humanity of everyone involved and the creative freedom for experimentation and collaboration.

Why Above the Palace?

Above the Palace is a nod to the iconic Toronto dive bar and landmark, Lee’s Palace, located in The Annex district of the city’s core. Lee’s Palace is the place to be on a Friday night that brings like-minded yet unlikely people together. But while the main floor, or “palace”, is bumping with the live eclectic sounds of rock and jazz, it’s the dance floor above Lee’s Palace, the Dance Cave that our three co-founders have the fondest memories of from back in their university days.

We see Lee’s Palace as a metaphorical example of the pyramid structure within the entertainment industry. If the palace is the house of the big fish, we want to be above it. At Above the Palace, we’re breaking all the rules.

We operate in our own unconventional ecosystem that aligns to who we truly are and what our audience craves. We thrive on pushing guardrails and clashing together all our unique experiences outside of traditional filmmaking, working with people from interdisciplinary backgrounds to support fresh and innovative storytelling. This might be unorthodox to many, but we think this is where the magic happens.

We are third culture kids all from different cultural communities, and with our eyes and ears to the ground. We bring with us combined experience working in all facets of the entertainment industry, from performer to key creative to producing for different formats including film, television and digital series, new media, live performance and installation art.