BIO

A native of Co.Clare, Ireland, Claudia is an award-winning theatre director, writer, and scholar based between Chicago and Ireland. Her work is rooted in somatic storytelling and often explores unexpected intimacies, life in rural Ireland, and the pursuit of joy in unlikely places.

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Recent Chicago-based directing credits include: Love Like Real by Kate McMorran (reading), Slutbot by Michelle Houle (reading), assistant director for Remy Bumppo's production of The Year of Magical Thinking (Theatre Wit, Chicago), assistant director and lead dramaturg on The Battlefields of Clara Barton, a new musical by Suzan Zeder and Jenn Hartmann Luck. She also served as the dramaturg for Night Side Songs by the Lazours (American Music Theatre Project).

 

Other directing credits include the award-winning Knowing Nathan by Tony Doyle and Laura O’Shea (The Complex, Dublin/ Galway Fringe Festival, Winner of the Judge’s Choice Award 2018) and Goodnight, Lovelace (Links Hall, Chicago, Winner of the A&H Council Prize at UT Dallas), Shakers (Smock Alley, 2019), It Will Break (Smock Alley, 2019) and Constellations (The Samuel Beckett Theatre, 2016).

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Claudia has honed her directing craft by working as an assistant director at The Peacock at The Abbey, Ireland's National Theatre, with the American Musical Theatre Project, Australia's award-winning The Rabble, Chicago's Remy Bumppo Theater Company, and as a movement director with Rough Magic. She has also undertaken a directing observership at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. Her work has been supported by Dublin's Fringe Lab, Clare County Council, and Fishamble: The New Play Company.

 

As a playwright, her debut one-woman play The Wendy House debuted at Smock Alley, Boy’s School in May 2018 (★★★★- The Arts Review). Her short play The Marble Contraption was published online by the Olivier award-winning Fishamble: The New Play Company. She has also written for Northwestern's leading children's theatre Imagine U. She has also served as a playwriting mentor for ASSITEJ’s ‘In the Works’ Theatre for Young Audiences festival in South Africa. 

 

As an actor Claudia has performed in Irish theatres such as The Samuel Beckett Theatre, The New Theatre and Smock Alley, on RTÉ Television and in several independent films. She has taught acting at the Norris Centre at Northwestern University.

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Claudia is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama program. Her research examines how female gendered objects and technologies, or what she terms 'virtual women', perform logics of gendered and racialized embodiment. She is the recipient of several academic accolades including a Gold Medal from Trinity College, Dublin (BA in Drama and Theatre Studies), the Herman Diedrich and Richard Johnson Families Scholarship and the Dissertation Development Program Fellowship (Northwestern University.)