Kerilie McDowall

Kerilie McDowall is a guitar teacher and guitarist-composer (music graduate) as the owner of Oceanview Guitar Studio & Creative Services and she’s a recording artist press, publicity and grants and music industry coach, writer, and music judge 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 as a radio producer for over 17 years working with many of the major jazz artists in Canada.

Kerilie and her team were shocked and floored to learn in 2024 that the film cast of her short jazz documentary film In the Zone: Rick Kilburn had reached almost one and a half billion hits 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 it was still a massive surprise. She is now known globally due to her film work created when she was a volunteer TV Director/TV Host/TV Producer for 7 years at Shaw Spotlight.

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 the 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 just finished adjudicating and grant coaching for the MiMc Music Awards in Ontario and is in the middle of music judging for the $50,000 Polaris Music Prize. She is still 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, currently on hold as she writes jazz sextet music for a new debut jazz album, but she is also looking for a great day gig. She teaches guitar students of all levels at her second part-time business Oceanview Guitar Studio & Creative Services.

She is currently pitching to investors and hopes to distribute her short film In the Zone: Rick Kilburn to the global education world to share the inspiration of 20-time award-winning jazz bassist, producer, and composer Rick Kilburn with others.

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 performed meditative solo guitar works on many podcasts, and is still doing interviews and occasional performances on global podcasts.

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 the King Charles III Coronation Medal by the Ladysmith-Nanaimo community.