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Kerilie McDowall is an active part-time mentor and coach, helping recording artists, writers, composers, and filmmakers with publicity, reaching the press, music sync, branding, grant writing, and media strategy. She has worked with hundreds of musicians, many of whom are JUNO award winners or nominees. She was one of Canada's first female jazz bandleader-jazz guitarists, performing professionally as a jazz bandleader in Vancouver, BC, from 1989-2000.
Kerilie has served on the women’s shelter crisis line, volunteered at the local volunteer society, while also volunteering in television and radio to serve the community for a combined 26 years. She enjoyed working in the community with people of varied abilities, health challenges, and mental illness for 11 years. In 2025, she was nominated for her volunteer work for the King Charles III Coronation Medal by the Ladysmith-Nanaimo community.
McDowall is a guitar teacher and guitarist-composer (music graduate) as the owner of Oceanview Guitar Studio & Creative Services based on Vancouver Island, Canada.
McDowall is a 17-time awarded jazz filmmaker and guitarist and past jazz radio host. She has interviewed many top award-winning Canadian jazz artists (Sonny Greenwich, Eleanor Collins, Jesse Zubot, Phil Dwyer, Christine/Ingrid Jensen, Don Thompson, Miranda Sage) as a radio producer for over 17 years working with many of the major jazz artists in Canada. Her short jazz documentary film In the Zone: Rick Kilburn, had reached almost one and a half billion hits with its cast on IMDB Pro.
Kerilie as a past TV Director had been film festing globally in the US, Canada, and Europe, and widely in Asia, and the IMDB hits were still a massive surprise. She is now known globally due to her film work on In the Zone: Rick Kilburn created when she was a volunteer TV Director/TV Host/TV Producer for 7 years at Shaw Spotlight.
She is currently pitching to film investors and hopes to distribute her short film In the Zone: Rick Kilburn to the global education/streaming/virtual world to share the inspiration of 20-time award-winning jazz bassist, producer, and composer Rick Kilburn with others.
Kerilie wrote for four years for the USA's prestigious DownBeat jazz magazine and also connected with many USA and international jazz artists during that time. She still judges the DownBeat critics poll, while writing occasionally for All About Jazz.com. She writes part-time for her jazz and lifestyle blog In the Zen. Other music publications/articles have included magazines like Canadian Musician, INSPIRED 55+, Musicworks, Canadian Antique Phonograph Society, and the Polaris Music Prize.
Kerilie is coaching the award-winning emerging and professional recording artists from the MiMc Music Awards (Music in Motion Canada).
Kerilie judged Canada's JUNO Awards from 2016 until 2024 and is on a short break from it for now. McDowall opened a new film and music production business called Avebury Moon Music & Film, as she wrote jazz sextet music for a new debut jazz album. She teaches guitar students of all levels at her second part-time business Oceanview Guitar Studio & Creative Services.
In 2025 and 2026, she has been actively creative and wrote 14 jazz ensemble compositions on her guitar and at her dining table in the past 7 months. She won the Creative Innovator Award from Nanaimo’s Women of Influence in 2024, and she performs meditative solo guitar works on many podcasts.
Book a session with Kerilie McDowall HERE.