nia farrell
creator/writer, performer, & mundane afrofuturist
about me
Nia Farrell (she/they) is a creator/writer, performer, and Mundane Afrofuturist.
On stage and screen, Nia specializes in ritual-based work that celebrates the dreams of Blk communities and offers paths to actualizing those dreams. Through this work, they invite audiences and performers alike to exercise the muscles of radical imagination and envision near-futures that begin today.
Since graduating from NYU (Tisch Drama; ETW), Nia has collaborated with and/or presented work at National Black Theatre, Theater Mitu (Hybrid Arts), Second Stage Theater, Ars Nova (ANT Fest), Williamstown Theatre Festival, PlayCo, New Ohio Theatre (Producers Club), and more.
the projects
about the collabs
Ta-Nia
Nia Farrell also makes work alongside director Talia Paulette Oliveras as Ta-Nia: a theatre-making duo dedicated to making Blk space in an anti-Blk society.
Together, Ta-Nia has collaborated and/or presented work in New York at Mercury Store, Playwrights Realm, Soho Rep (Writer/Director Lab; A Map to Nowhere things are), Ars Nova (ANT Fest; Dreams in Blk Major), and internationally at Berliner Festspiele Theatertreffen Stückemarkt, Schauspiel Dortmund (Eternity, The End, and Everything that Never Began), and Hessisches Landestheater Marburg (Tactics for the Future).
Ta-Nia was named as finalists for the Jerome Hill Artists Fellowship and SPACE on Ryder Farm Creative Residency.
Nine Muses Entertainment
As the Director of Development and Production at Nine Muses Entertainment, founded by Bryce Dallas Howard, Nia supports the company’s slate of projects and co-facilitates its emerging artist programming.
A member of the first Nine Muses Lab cohort at NYU, Nia has since supported Howard on the live-action Star Wars series Skeleton Crew, The Mandalorian, and The Book of Boba Fett (Disney+). She is a co-producer on an upcoming documentary feature for Disney+, directed by Howard and produced by Imagine Docs, and will Co-EP the feature film All of Her for Nine Muses.
In 2021, Nia joined Howard and Rachel Friedman in the SXSW EDU panel “Creating Curricular Partnerships: Nine Muses Lab.”
what people are saying
“Nia’s work occupies space inside of the speculative, specular, and the spectacular. Speculative: not only about possible futures, but also possible pasts and presents. Specular: not only as a question of self-reflection, as in a mirror, but also reflection more broadly, of images and ideals originating from a range of sources. Spectacular: not only as a matter of the dramatic and the visually engrossing, but also the arresting, the striking, the breathtaking.”
— Dominique Rider, director
“Nia repurposes traditional modalities of theater and shape-shifts resources towards her own queer POC storytelling and community-building; her work is not daunted by ‘the system,’ which is another way of saying she is always searching for the heart in any scenario.”
— Haruna Lee, theater maker
“[Nia] is imaginative but precise when it comes to building worlds and the people who live in them. She honors the people represented in stories… and does so in a way that is rooted in truth and celebratory of these communities. Giving them a voice is never enough; she makes sure that those voices have time and space to speak.”
— Young Jean Lee, playwright
