amanda mcraven
director
Amanda McRaven is originally from Charlottesville, Virginia where she began acting at the age of 14 in Annie Get Your Gun. She directed her first play, Anne of Green Gables, at the age of 20. She has a BA in English and Theatre from the University of Virginia and an MFA in Directing from the University of California, Irvine, where she studied with Dr Keith Fowler and Bill Rauch, of Cornerstone Theatre and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
She is most interested in creating collaborative, interactive performance with no fourth walls. Her inspirations are non-Western performance, dance, and personal creativity. Her artistic influences are Anne Bogart, Ariane Mnouchkine, Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Wilson, and Derevo. With her company, FUGITIVE, she seeks to create live performance that invigorates performer and audience, and perpetuates Artaud’s notion of the “acrobat of the heart.”
In addition to directing, Amanda’s interest in social arts programs led her to The Voice Project, a writing and performance program for female inmates. She is currently expanding FUGITIVE and The Voice Project into an international performance ensemble encouraging people to make theatre with their own voices.
She is the recipient of a 2008 Fulbright award to study community-based theatre and its relationship to culture in New Zealand. Amanda now resides in Palmerston North, NZ, where she is working on The Voice Project Aotearoa, an ensemble-based piece on cultural identity in a multicultural society.
