A writer/performer/director, Lisa D'Amour creates passionate, poetic theatre in a multiplicity of forms. Whether she’s writing a full-length play or making site-specific performance, there’s an obsession with the ephemeral, an inquiry toward scale and site, and in language fresh and strange. (She described one of her events as “a cross between a prophesy by an oracle, a corporate convention, and a Rockettes-style spectacle performed by men in business suits.”)

Performances are often structured by visual images; performers speak directly to audiences and use objects to tell the tale. Imagine D’Amour leading visitors through a large neutral office space into a tiny room cum rainforest with leafy ceiling, paper-bark walls, and mossy floor.

Committed to the “potential of truly collaborative creation, from the ground up,” she frequently works with artists of many disciplines, including long-time associates Katie Pearl, Kathy Randels, and Krista Kelley Walsh.

D’Amour sees laughter as a tool for participation and peppers her works with jokes and serious silliness. Yet, unafraid of darkness, she often writes about exile and loss. Her riff on the character of Stanley Kowalski—a solo created for her brother to perform—is as much about Brando, her family, and a broken New Orleans, as it is about the archetypal character.

"I want to make work that makes people brave."