Anya Pearson

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Anya Pearson is an award-winning actress, playwright, poet, producer, and activist. She is a 2025 AGE Legacy Playwright. 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, marking the first time in the state’s history that an African-American playwright was nominated.

Anya was a finalist for Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program in 2023, for the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting at Brown University in 2020, and the National Black Theatre’s Playwriting Residency in 2019. She is currently under commission at Portland Center Stage and Many Hats. Her reimagining of Agamemnon, The Killing Fields, was developed at Seven Devils New Play Foundry, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, Valdez Theatre Conference, SUNY: New Paltz Theatre Department, and New York Classical. The prequel to The Killing Fields, Without a Formal Declaration of War was commissioned by Portland Center Stage and developed at JAW at Portland Center Stage, Seven Devils New Play Foundry, and Great Plains Theatre Conference. Both plays received developmental workshops in New York City last Fall through Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Urban Haiku, and The New Group. Anya’s Three Love Songs, a short play about life during the pandemic, originally commissioned by Portland Center Stage as part of the Play At Home Initiative, was featured in the Wolly Mammoth Theatre’s Connectivity Initiative and was also produced by Western Oregon University. During her time in Under Construction 4 at the Road Theatre, she continued to develop Three Love Songs and Butterflies Eat Decay into a full-length play.

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 was a featured panelist in the Beyond the Stage Series at Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of Eve Ensler’s new play, In the Body of the World. An excerpt from her multi-disciplinary piece, Above a Whisper, a fusion of poetry, narrative, dance, visual art, and film, which tackles sexual harassment, debuted at SALT (Shaking The Tree). Anya wrote the script for and starred in ____ the Wolf, a deconstruction of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale exploring modern day relationships and the “assigned roles” of women at each stage of life (Drammy Award). She also produced a multidisciplinary night of performance and panel discussion around sexual violence in association with The Old Church and their “We Can Listen” Series. At the event, she brought together a panel of rape survivors who discussed their experiences as well as what survival and support mean to them.

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 the Artistic Director of We Are Urban Haiku, an online writing center and community that works to actively decolonize writing pedagogy and practice while increasing accessibility and centering the global majority. She is also the CEO of Urban Haiku Clothing, a BIPOC-owned wearable activism clothing label. Her poetry is featured in Electric Literature. She has received residencies from Kripalu’s Artists and Activists Program and UCROSS.

A spoonie. A survivor. A single mother. A body alive with multiple nexuses of marginalized identity and sediments of trauma, she 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.

Anya is currently writing a four-play cycle reimagining the Oresteia through an African-American lens, a novel, two pilots, a short and a feature, and constantly plotting, planning, devising, creating, imagining, and revising visions of a better, more just world.

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 Two-Year acting program at William Esper Studio in New York City and the Screen Acting Intensive at Actors Studio at Pinewood Studios UK. She continues to train at AMAW in Los Angeles and the Sustainable Actor Collective in Atlanta.

Her best production is her 13-year-old daughter, Aidy, 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?”

“Made to Dance in Burning Buildings is a Ferocious Rush of Pain and Catharsis” — Review in Willamette Week, March 5, 2019

The Measure of Innocence makes The Kilroys List | March 6, 2020

The Killing Fields — Play development workshop at Seven Devils New Play Foundry, 2020

Staged reading of The Killing Fields — August 16, 2022, 7 PM, at New York Classical Theatre in the Great Room at ART/New York’s South Oxford Space, 138 Oxford Street, Brooklyn, NY.

Watch the trailer for the World Premiere of Made to Dance in Burning Buildings by Anya Pearson

Three Love Songs

Three Love Songs — Commissioned by Portland Center Stage for the national theater project Play at Home

Download the script of Three Love Songs — perform it for FREE as part of the national theater project Play at Home

Watch a video of Three Love Songs