Anya Pearson is an award-winning actress, playwright, poet, producer, and activist. She was a 2021-2022 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. She was also the inaugural winner of the $10,000 Voice is a Muscle Grant from the Corporeal Voices Foundation run by best-selling author Lidia Yuknavitch, 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. Anya received the $10,000 Problem Play Commission to adapt Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure focused on mass incarceration of black bodies and the other numerous failings of our criminal justice system...
Anya Pearson is an award-winning actress, playwright, poet, producer, and activist. She was a 2021-2022 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. She was also the inaugural winner of the $10,000 Voice is a Muscle Grant from the Corporeal Voices Foundation run by best-selling author Lidia Yuknavitch, 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. Anya received the $10,000 Problem Play Commission to adapt Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure focused on mass incarceration of black bodies and the other numerous failings of our criminal justice system. Her adaptation, The Measure of Innocence, was selected for the 2020 Kilroys List, won the 2020 Drammy Award for Best Original Script, and was a Finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Drama. Anya was a finalist for the 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting at Brown University and the National Black Theatre’s 2019 I Am Soul Playwriting Residency. She is currently under commission at Portland Center Stage and Many Hats. Her spoken word protest poem “What it IS and What it ISN’T” was featured in PAVEMENT, a drive-in pop up performance produced by Boom Arts and Risk/Reward Festival and additionally, in a community conversation between Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty. 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. A spoonie. A survivor. A single mother. A body alive with multiple nexuses of marginalized identity and sediments of trauma, Anya is a fierce advocate for survivors of sexual and domestic violence, BIPOC folx, the chronically ill, those with rare diseases, and the disabled. Passionate about helping empower others through the transformational power of story, she teaches antiracist and decolonized approaches to embodied writing, holds space for marginalized identities and helps folx of diverse backgrounds to find their voices through the power of writing. As an actor, she is a member of Actors’ Equity Association and has appeared in numerous regional theatre productions, commercials, and independent films. 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 11-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?”
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