Anya Pearson is an award-winning actress, playwright, poet, producer, and activist. She is a current Hodder Fellow at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts. She was in the inaugural winner of the $10,000 Voice is a Muscle Grant from the Corporeal Voices Foundation, for her choreopoem, Made to Dance in Burning Buildings. Made to Dance in Burning Buildings was showcased at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater and received its World Premiere at Shaking The Tree Theatre where Anya was the Playwright-in-Residence for the 2018-2019 season. STT received an AGE Grant for Made to Dance in Burning Buildings. Her adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, The Measure of Innocence, was selected for the 2020 Kilroys List, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Drama, and won the 2020 Drammy Award for Best Original Script. Her reimagining of Agamemnon, The Killing Fields, was developed at Seven Devils New Play Foundry, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, the Valdez Theatre Conference, and will next be featured in the New Visions Reading Series at New York New Classical. She is currently back at Seven Devils working on the Prequel to The Killing Fields, Without a Formal Declaration of War. Commissioned by Portland Center Stage, it will next be at JAW at PCS. Anya runs a multimedia production company called Urban Haiku whose mission is to produce groundbreaking work that transcends the traditional boundaries of performance while also serving as the catalyst for art and community action to combine for real social change. She is on staff at Corporeal Writing where she runs a BIPOC collective and teaches classes on writing around chronic illness, trauma, and activism. She is finishing her debut collection of poetry, writing three pilots and a novel, launching a BIPOC-owned, wearable art clothing label, and constantly plotting, planning, devising, creating, imagining, and revising visions of a better world. She is a member of Linestorm Playwrights, Couch Film Collective, Actors’ Equity Association, and the Dramatists Guild. Anya is a graduate of the acting program at William Esper Studio in New York City and continues to train at AMAW in Los Angeles. Her best production is her 9-year-old daughter, Aidee, who can be seen most nights, trying to circumvent bedtime by asking deep philosophical questions like: “When are we going to see the world? When is my life going to truly begin?”

Find her online at:
www.anyapearson.com
IG: @iamanyapearson
Twitter: @anyapearson

Excerpts of Performance: 

The Complexity of Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwzHvqdzokE&t=10s

Three Love Songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAxPZQT77aM&t=27s

Teaching:

Corporeal Writing: 

http://www.corporealwriting.com/ethnoautobiography

http://www.corporealwriting.com/online-workshops-sign-up/nightswimming

Seven Devils: 

https://www.sevendevils.org/2022conference.html

Recent Publications: 

https://electricliterature.com/two-poems-by-anya-pearson/