Erica Wray, Director

Erica Wray (she/her) is a New Play Director, Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst, and Intimacy Director. She uses aspects of these movement modalities to create work that is highly kinetic, physically expressive, and makes the impossible possible. Erica specializes in directing new plays by feminist and queer writers that explore relationships, loneliness, and the need for human connection. She is fascinated by shifting energy between people onstage and attempts to harness this energy to tell stories.

Erica is a co-founder of  The Interstitial,  a producing partnership dedicated to amplifying exciting new works. 
A Chicago ex-at, she served as Co-Founder of Knife & Fork, a theatre company dedicated to social practice around food, feminism, and body politics, and as Co-Artistic Director of Blank Line Collective, a movement-based and devised theater company. 

She has had the great pleasure of working with Iowa Playwrights Workshop writers Marisela Treviño Orta, C Meaker, Charles Green, Eric Marlin, Leigh M. Marshall, K.T. Peterson, and SP O’Brien.

Chicago: Prop Thtr, Collaboraction, Promethean Theatre Ensemble, Broken Nose Theatre, City Lit Theater,
Chicago Fringe Festival, The Poetry Foundation.
Regional: Playwrights’ Center, The Hippodrome Theatre, Great River Shakespeare Festival, One Minute Play Festival, Junior Players

SDC Associate
MFA in Directing: University of Iowa.
BA: University of North Texas.

Reviews

“Having the experience of working with Erica Barnes on a production last semester served as the biggest inspiration for how I went about directing this production,” Williams said. “Knowing how to ‘spice up a Zoom meeting’ helped me realize what I could develop within this show.” -- Albert Williams, The Daily Iowan​

"Created by Dani Bryant and directed by Erica Vannon, [Gender Breakdown] is a funny, poignant and enraging exploration of size-ism, racism and sexism in the theater, and how these “isms” are deployed against women who have the nerve to try to break the boxes of stereotyping. In all, the cast succeeds mightily on two fronts: The call for change is loud, clear, unapologetic and needed. It is also a marvelous piece of theater."
--Catey Sullivan, Chicago Sun-Times, Gender Breakdown at Collaboraction

"While the tone set by many plays was rather humorous, they all held powerful underlying critiques of society. Whether it be from the riotously and righteously feminist Spanx You Very Much, each sketch forced you to think about social issues in its own unique way."
--Chicago Stage Standard, Spanx You Very Much at Collaboraction Sketchbook

"....the choreography [is} particularly memorable, turning the women into everything from a large warship to a gang of menacing suitors."
--Marissa Oberlander, Chicago Reader, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

"Last Meal Man" is a "most compelling" (Chicago Tribune) "powerful" (TimeOut Chicago), "frightful and fascinating" (NewCity) "festival highlight"(The Reader).
--Last Meal Man at Collaboration Sketchbook

"Director Erica Barnes captures this mood piece's flight from consensual reality by inverting the theater-in-the-round format: audience members sit huddled in the center of an unfinished Pilsen loft space while the action whirls around them...but Barnes's format suits the story's sense of perpetual, ungrounded motion."
--Keith Griffith, Chicago Reader, Disgrace by John O'Keefe


Episode 15 – Erica Vannon /February 5, 2017
Director Erica Vannon is drawn to the kind of work that makes you “giggle into a bit of horror.”  Or stand up and scream like you’re at a football game.  Or cry (a lot (if you’re me)).  She produces the impossible, like a devised opera performed in a hotel room or a 3 minute dance piece with 47 performers.