Erika Phoebus (she/her) is a queer, neurodivergent playwright whose work orbits around pleasure, autonomy, and all things magical, strange, and a little horrific.
Her work has been developed and/or produced at the Great Plains Theatre Conference, New Ohio Theatre, Primary Stages ESPA, So-Fi Festival, Torn Page, Theatre 4the People, Actors Theatre of NY, and the McKittrick Hotel (home of Sleep No More). She's received residencies from Fresh Ground Pepper’s BRB retreat and Theatre 4the People @theBarn, and was a winner of the 47th Samuel French OOB Festival, with the winning play, Shark Week, now published & licensed by Concord Theatricals. She was named a finalist for the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab (2022-23) and the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference (2023). Erika has taught playwriting at Bowie High School (Austin, TX), Westerly High School (Westerly, RI), Arizona Actors Academy (Phoenix, AZ), and offers playwriting workshops, script consultations, and dramaturgical support online and in NYC.
Erika is also a trained intimacy professional and continues to expand her education and understanding of consent-based practices at Intimacy Directors & Coordinators (IDC) and Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE). It is a core mission of hers to develop and support consent-based practices in new work development and playwright-centered spaces. B.F.A. Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. William Esper Meisner Conservatory alum. Dramatist Guild member.
Artist Statement
Isn't it weird to live in a body?
Isn't it weird to be so confined and so endless at the same time?
Isn't it wild how many things can exist within us at the same time?
Often magical and strange, my work tends to concern itself with intimacy, autonomy, and the comforts and confinements of having a physical form. My work strives to explore the ways women and queer folks have been systemically conditioned to disassociate from our pleasure, and the ways white supremacy culture disconnects us from our bodies. I'm interested in creating spaces that invite the audience to safely and joyously reconnect to themselves.
My work often asks "...are you breathing?"
I'm interested in coaxing the audience back into their own bodies
with tenderness
with play
with surprise
with breath
with each other.
I believe in stories that invite our bodies to internalize possibilities, while holding space for the complications and complexities of where we are right now. I create as a way of exposing myself to the worlds I want to live in, using the collision of past, present, and future to give my nervous system some practice renegotiating my relationship to kindness, safety, joy, mess, and imagination. I’m interested in creating narrative containers that are so alive and tethered to the play, the structure has no other choice but to change, to break apart, to break open.
I write to break open.
So let's get weird, y'all.
want more? check out my New Play Exchange Profile