Ash Heffernan

Ash Heffernan is originally from Jacksonville, FL. She graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a dual BA in Dramatic Art and Performance Studies, and a minor in Social and Economic Justice. They were a 2019 Williamstown Theatre Festival Apprentice and a 2019/2020 Portland Playhouse Apprentice, which brought her to the PNW. They acted and created performance work regionally in North Carolina and Oregon before moving to New York. They were a 2022-2023 Company Member with Third Rail Repertory, and are a founding ensemble member of immersive, site specific horror company Witch Hunt Theatre. They are particularly passionate about black feminist art and performance, new works development, and theatre for social justice. She believes in a Free Palestine and Black Lives Matter. 

Project Title: The impossible individual: practices in audience-aware solo performance

Project Description: Through a single performer, we further realize the impossibility of the “individual”. Our stories about ourselves are also always about the people and places that shape us, affect us, within which we inhabit, and with which we have relationships.

I believe the usefulness and effect of “audience-aware solo performance” as a form is that it narrows the scope of a story and storytelling as an action, perhaps all the way to obscurity. I argue that a single performer obfuscates and challenges the very idea of “an individual”. Through the appearance of one, we see the collective.

Academic Interests: Performance art, solo performance, accessible/inclusive performance, devised performance, disability theory, queer theory, black feminist thought, black feminist art