nia farrell
creator/writer, performer, & mundane afrofuturist
headshot & resume available upon request
about nia
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 a future that begins today.
Since graduating from NYU (Tisch Drama; ETW), Nia has collaborated with and/or presented work at National Black Theatre, Theater Mitu (Hybrid Arts Lab), Second Stage Theater, Ars Nova (ANT Fest), Williamstown Theatre Festival, PlayCo, New Ohio Theatre (Producers Club), and more.
Click below to explore Nia’s projects:
*What's a Mundane Afrofuturist? Read Martine Syms’ manifesto here
about the collabs
Nia also makes work alongside artistic soulmate 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 Hessische 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.
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.
Most recently, she supported Howard on the live-action Star Wars series The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and the upcoming Skeleton Crew (Disney+). Nia is also a co-producer on the upcoming documentary Pets (Disney+), directed by Howard and produced by Imagine Documentaries.
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