Angela Kariotis

“Angela Kariotis is a one woman artistic showcase…in her trailblazing storytelling.”

angela kaRIOTis is a Greek-American, writer, performer, scholar, and educator. As an extension of her activist work, Angela’s creative works provoke thought and entertain, while aimed at cultivating social change. This high energy work incorporates scopes of science, philosophy, and history, offering insight about our collective histories, greatest ideas, and thinking in new contexts. All of it brought to life on stage through movement, characters, and poetic drama. She incorporates unpredictable sources and material in her work creating an entirely new genre. And because Angela is an active participant from within the Hip Hop culture, much of her work is committed to Hip Hop theatre. Exploring, expanding, and exciting.

Angela pairs her unique background with modern performance art to produce a one-of-a-kind artistic experience. Using movement and gesture, she creates characters from her past and fuses them with all genres of literature, prose, dramatic poetry, song, and more, addressing ideas of ethnicity, gender, and public policy.

While Angela pulls much of her material from life, she sharpened her skills at Seton Hall University (Winner, Paidea Award for Excellence in Performance) and The University of Texas at Austin, Masters in Performance Studies and Communication Studies (Winner, Most Artistic, Texas Revue). Her first solo show, REMINISCENCE OF THE GHETTO & OTHER THINGS THAT RAIZED ME, directed and developed by the acclaimed multi-disciplinary performance artist Paul Bonin-Rodriguez. The show was described as “Inspiring, enlightening, funny, heart-breaking and boundry-breaking…” by NYTheatre.com while playing at the NY International Fringe Festival. Reminiscence…, was awarded a National Performance Network residency and presented by Woman & Their Work and the Rude Mechanicals/Madge Darlington in Austin, TX. Since then Angela has brought her unique performance style across America, playing in venues such as The University of California- Los Angeles (UCLA-Live), Contact Theater in Manchester, UK, to Legion Arts in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and New York City with the Hip Hop Theater Festival.

Her second show, SAY LOGOS SAY WORD, about bridging the gap between Ancient and Modern Greece, was commissioned by the People’s Light and Theater Company in Malvern, Pennsylvania and presented by Queens Theater in the Park and Chicago's Hellenic Museum and Cultural Center.

Angela’s awards include a 2007 Playwriting Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a grant from the Puffin Foundation, a Tennessee Williams Theater Fellowship from the University of the South, a Lily Grant commission. With the support of a National Performance Network Creation Fund award she developed her latest show, STRETCH MARKS, a solo show about having a baby. STRETCH MARKS premiered at The University of Texas at Austin in November 2009.

Angela was featured as a Hip Hop Theatre artist at Planet Hip Hop 3 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and was a workshop participant for fiction at Macondo Writers Workshop, a workshop founded by writer Sandra Cisneros that takes place in San Antonio, TX.

Her short story, Happy Hair, was awarded honorable mention (1 of 10 chosen from 2,000 entries) in Francis Ford Copolla’s Zoetrope: All Story Fiction Contest.

Full resume available upon request.

She’ll stop speaking in third person now. I mean, I will.