Буря Devised by Nadiya Atkinson ’22-16.jpg

about

Nadiya (she/hers) is a director and writer from a houseplant and immigrant household, currently based in New York. Circus and craft inspired, she works in the intersections of mediums and has developed work at the O’Neill Theater Center, HERE Arts Center, the Bechdel Project, the Connelly, 59E59, Theater Row, and the Edinburgh Fringe.

As a theatre artist and administrator, she served as the Humanities Manager at Theatre for a New Audience where she produced the 360 Viewfinder dramaturgical publication and has worked at the O’Neill, the Vineyard, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Signature Theatre Company. Her recent work employs tactility, bold patterns, and site-specificity to navigate her relationship with geography and community. Nadiya is a founding member of fishmarket theatre co. where she directs physical theatre works based in embodied dramaturgy and multidisciplinary collaboration.

Nadiya is a graduate of École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, where she trained in devised physical theatre. In addition, she studied at the National Theatre Institute in Advanced Directing, at Sorbonne Nouvelle, and with Complicité. She graduated Williams College with a B.A. in Theatre with Honors as a Hutchinson Memorial Fellow, Ruth Scott Sanford Fellow, and Wilmers Student Thesis Fellow.

I am a circus-informed and immigrant-influenced director, reveling in folktales, patterns, and embodied memory. For me, directing is community organizing: each piece I make is tactile and organic, duct-taped together through interdisciplinary investigation and emergent from the people in the room. I tell narratives that surprise, that find comfort in dimensionality. I write plays about pancakes and family dysfunction, paint life-loving snails which may-or-may not be squashed, and direct dramas with comedy improvisers.

I put collaborative storytelling at the center of my work and to bring shows outside of traditional venues, into places where my pieces can converse with geography and community. My schemes are two-fold: to create worlds for urgent, new work and to do it in spaces in which traditional leadership forms are dismantled through clown noses, Hall & Oates dance parties, and collective Wikipedia spirals.
You can take a further look at some of the work I make with some partners-in-crime in our collective Fishmarket Theatre Co. Link here.
* Reading ✧ Upcoming
DIRECTING
CRINGE by the Three Sardines | 59E59, Edinburgh Fringe (2024)
THE MISANTHROPE by Olivia Hunt | HERE Arts Center (2024)
INSERTION by Sarah Groustra | The Connelly Theater (2024)
BIPOLAR BADASS by Marisol Crawford | Theatre Row (2024)
MUSEUM by Tina Howe | Fishmarket Theatre Co. (2024)
PARKING LOT FAIRIES by Franny Weed | Chain Theatre (2023)
SCENES WITH GIRLS by Miriam Battye | Cap & Bells (2021)
BURYA (THE TEMPEST) adapted Shakespeare | Williams College (2021)
SAVING WONDERLAND by Chad Gorn | Braving the Bard (2021)
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST by W. Shakespeare | Braving the Bard (2020)
NOISES OFF by Michael Frayn | Cap & Bells (2019)
SKANK by Phoebe Mattana | Cap & Bells (2018)
508 | 90 DAYS by A. Herzog, L. Meriwether | Williams College (2018)
WILL by Nadiya Atkinson | San Diego Fringe Festival (2018)
ASSOCIATE/ASSISTANT DIRECTING
IN THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION* by Terry Jastrow | dir. Margarett Perry | The Lark | 2019
A BOLD STROKE FOR A WIFE* by Susanna Centilivre | dir. Margarett Perry | The Resident Acting Co. | 2019
THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT by Stephen Adly Guirgis | dir. Shadi Ghaheri | Williams College | 2019

CONTACT

inspirations

clowns (of all sorts), folk stories, craft, long walks ((in stretch pants with lavender coifs)), complicite, Lygia Pape, a very niche movement called impressionism, Emergent Strategy, sci-fi, a decades old Sherlock Holmes love

dream directing

New works (of all sorts); The Old Man and the Old Moon; Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812; self-translated adaptation of The Cherry Orchard; installation art Hamlet (just give me 5 minutes, I’ll explain); anything circus related