About

Bio

SARA LYONS is a Los Angeles-based director who seeks to explode form and politic in critically embodied, often interdisciplinary new theatre and performance works. Working frequently in adaptation, social practice, and new media as well as theatre, their work has been presented nationally and internationally by The Kitchen, REDCAT, Los Angeles Performance Practice, OUTsider, SFX Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre, HERE Arts Center, LaMaMa, Edinburgh Fringe, and more.

Current projects include Sophia Cleary’s One & Only (The Kitchen), an experiment in theater for an audience of one, and Paul Outlaw’s BBC (Big Black Cockroach) and BigBlackOctoberSurprise, a Kafka-inspired live horror farce in which a white Tr*mp-supporting woman wakes up as a montrous vermin—a black man (REDCAT 2019). Sara’s ongoing project I’m Very Into You is an original adaptation of the published 1995 email correspondence by feminist literary legend Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark. Called “worth keeping an eye out for” by American Theatre Magazine, I’m Very Into You is an ongoing queer archival performance project engaging queer and feminist artists in communities around the country. It has been presented by The Wattis Institute, Los Angeles Performance Practice, and OUTsider.

Sara has received residencies from Ucross Foundation, Thymele Arts (2020 Resident Artist), PAM Residencies, and Los Angeles Performance Practice/Automata LA.

Sara holds an MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University and is an alum of the Hemispheric Institute's EMERGENYC program for artists working at the intersection of performance and politics at NYU. Sara teaches at UCLA and Sarah Lawrence College, and their critical writing has been published by ContemporaryPerformance.com and Riting.org.

Artist Statement

I stage feminist legacies and feminist futures in critically embodied new theatre and performance works. My background in new play development, American experimental theatre, queer and feminist performance art, and gender studies inform a practice which weaves social engagement, new media, and adaptation into contemporary experiments in theatrical form.

I was radicalized through feminist theory in college. As a young person, the revelation of a new vocabulary through which to understand my desires, my frustrations, my experiences within intersecting queer and feminist legacies brought my concept of self into focus for the first time. I aim to make space for that same formative gift of witnessing and solidarity for both audiences and collaborators. Embracing technology and mediation as primary languages of the 21st century and socially engaged processes with marginalized performers, my practice re-embodies buried radical legacies of the past in order to center justice in the present and activate imaginations towards the future. To me, theory is a passionately embodied experience: language is a tool for reshaping the self and the world, a futurist playground. Audre Lorde describes the erotic as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Performance is a practice of relational erotics between artists and audiences, a playground where desire, politics, language, image, and the body meet to trailblaze new ways to live in community.

Performance is a vital social organ: in the streets we gather to make ourselves seen and heard; in the theater, we collectively heal, remember lost histories, and play to discover. The theater space becomes fuel for the fight, and vice versa. In an environmentally precarious, algorithm-driven world, my practice is a social lifeline where difference and deep listening thrive.