Anya Pearson

Playwright

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Anya Pearson is an award-winning actress, playwright, poet, producer, and activist. She was 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. Anya received the $10,000 Problem Play Commission to adapt Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure focused on mass incarceration and the numerous other failings of our criminal justice system and their complex and nuanced effects on the black family unit. Her adaptation, The Measure of Innocence, was selected for the 2020 Kilroys List and won the 2020 Drammy Award for Best Original Script. She was a finalist for the 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting and the National Black Theatre’s 2019 I Am Soul Playwriting Residency. Her reimagining of Agamemnon, The Killing Fields, was recently developed at Seven Devils New Play Foundry and will head to the Great Plains Theatre Conference in 2021. 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 currently launching a BIPOC collective through Corporeal Writing, finishing her debut collection of poetry, writing three pilots, launching a BIPOC-owned, PDX-based 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 8-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?”