About
I am a writer and a theater and dance maker. I am driven by a deep longing for collective liberation, and I want to contribute to bringing a world into existence in which all of us are free. I am transformed by making theater and watching performance. It is spiritual, it is ritual, it is a spell that calls into being, literally calls a changed way of being into all of our bodies. I want to create work that contributes to individual and societal transformation of myself, my collaborators, and the audience. I need it, as a queer person, as a woman, as someone whose ancestors abandoned their ethnic traditions to be the made up idea of “white” and passively and violently enacted and enforced white supremacy, as someone in a society that creates wounds, as someone wounded, I need transformation. So I stage worlds that don’t exist, or as José Esteban Muñoz writes of queerness, are “not yet here.”
Photo by Jody Christopherson
Casey Llewellyn is a playwright, writer, theater and dance artist whose work interrogates identity, collectivity and form. She lives in New York City and is in her final year of studying writing book & lyrics for musical theater at the Graduate Musical Theatre Program at NYU. She was a 2018-19 Jerome Fellow at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. Works include: O, Earth (commissioned and produced by The Foundry Theatre at HERE, 2016), I Am Bleeding All Over the Place: A Living History Tour (conceived by Brooke O'Harra, co-written with her, La Mama, 2016), The Body which is the Town, Come in. Be with me. Don't touch me., Zaide!, Obsession Piece, The Quiet Way, Existing Conditions (co-written with Claudia Rankine), and I Love Dick, an adaptation for theater of the book by Chris Kraus. Her essay "What We Could Do With Writing" appears in The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, edited by Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap. Her collaboration with Rankine "Theatre of Intimacy and Abandon" appears in Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, edited by Daniel Sack. Casey has an MFA from Brown University where she studied with Erik Ehn. She is a New Georges Affiliated Artist and was a founding member of The Racial Imaginary Institute where she served on the Curatorial Team 2016-18. She also has a coaching practice working with artists committed to social and environmental justice to create sustainability and align their lives with their values.
You can write me at PublicEmotions[at]gmail.com
If you want to see my CV, you can download it here.