Erin Shields is a Montreal-based playwright and stage actress. Her play If We Were Birds was the winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language drama in 2011. Shields is the playwright-in-residence at both the Tarragon Theatre and Nightwood Theatres and her work often reinterprets classic plays in a gender-swapped modern context.

Shields' most recent work, Paradise Lost, which debuted at the 2018 Stratford Festival, is a feminist retelling of John Milton's epic poem about a female Satan being expelled from Heaven and plotting her revenge on God.