Career
After earning her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto in 1974, where she studied film courses, Schuyler became a school teacher and taught for four years at Earl Grey Senior Public School in Toronto's east end. As a teacher, Schuyler began creating short films, which eventually became the inspiration for Degrassi. Schuyler's first film was a documentary named Between Two Worlds. She first attracted media attention when the NBC in the United States aired clips of Between Two Worlds out of context to support a news story about race relations in Toronto.
In 1976, Schuyler met Kit Hood, an editor of television commercials, when she needed help from an experienced editor to save the "muddled footage" of one of her projects. Hood and Schuyler found a balance; editor Hood was inexperienced in writing, and writer/producer Schuyler was inexperienced in editing, leading to their creative partnership and the formation of Playing With Time, Inc.
In 1979, Schuyler received a copy of the book Ida Makes a Movie, written by Kay Chorao, as material for a class about filmmaking. Although the book turned out to be children's fiction about a cat, Schuyler became interested in adapting the book into a movie, and planned to fly to New York to meet Chorao. Before leaving, Schuyler sought legal advice from Stephen Stohn, a lawyer who would eventually become her producing partner and husband. Stohn advised her to forego a lawyer and instead propose the deal herself.
Schuyler purchased the rights to the film for $200, and repurposed the film to be about a girl who enters a movie about the garbage in her neighborhood into a National Film Board-sponsored competition and wins, despite the film being misinterpreted as an anti-war piece. The resulting short film, Ida Makes a Movie, became the genesis for the anthology series The Kids of Degrassi Street, which became the first series in the Degrassi franchise.
In the early 1990s, Schuyler and Hood separated and Schuyler founded Epitome Pictures, a subsidiary of DHX Media, which produced Degrassi: The Next Generation, the franchise's most well-known series, and its direct sequel Degrassi: Next Class, which was released on Netflix. From 2004 to 2008 Schuyler executive produced the teen drama television series Instant Star about a young woman, played by Alexz Johnson, who wins a singer/songwriter contest.
In 2011 and 2012 she executive produced, alongside her husband, Stephen Stohn, the television series The L.A. Complex (working title: Highland Gardens) for Bell Media in Canada and The CW in the United States, about young Canadians dreaming of fame and fortune while struggling to survive in an apartment-style hotel in Los Angeles.
In July 2021, it was announced that ECW Press purchased the rights to Degrassi Matriarch, an autobiography/memoir that is said to "chronicle Schuyler's nearly four-decade adventure producing the Degrassi television shows". The memoir, The Mother Of All Degrassi, was released on November 15, 2022.
