OLIVIA BUNTAINE
citizen mythologist
Olivia uses myth, history, folklore, and story to build a more equitable and actualized world through writing, theatre-making, independent scholarship and teaching, and community practice.
Olivia has been drawn to old stories from a young age, and started her career as a classical actress in Los Angeles. After years of being told by experts that "Shakespeare didn't write strong women" and never seeing people who looked like herself or her friends onstage in the classical texts, she started her own theatre company. Project Nongenue centered the voices of women and marginalized populations in classical theatre and mythology. Project Nongenue is sleeping right now, but could wake back up at any moment.
Through Project Nongenue, she discovered her home in directing and then in writing: creating award-winning productions on stages across the country and writing scripts that troubled Very Important Industry People who Really Liked Her Work but It was Ultimately Not the Right Time For Them.
Olivia got her master's degree at The New School (before they eliminated most of their humanities programs), where she received a grant to study girlhood in ancient Greece and explore theatre-making as a modern practice of reclaiming democracy.
Today she lives in Denver, Colorado with her wife, her dog, Boo (as in ghost) and her kitten, Sybil (as in wandering ancient Greek prophetess). She writes in most forms of media that one can write in, teaches, makes theatre, and spends a fair amount of time wondering if this is what the Fall of Rome felt like.
Kyla Fear, Fearless Photography
olivia's Creative principles
1. Olivia believes in art which brings everyone to the table, starting with those of us who have not been invited.
2. Olivia believes that stories from the past are the architecture of our present. Revisiting those stories is imperative: sometimes to honor old wisdom, and often to challenge the old models we passively inherit.
3. Olivia believes a central function of art-making is to carve out room for experiences which are difficult to look at. She believes in creating accessible and honest ways to shine light on those experiences.
writing
Olivia writes anything she can get her hands on, but usually she ends up in the universes of freshly mosaicked antiquities and folklore, gender and ghosts, violence and its aftermath, or all of the above. Plays, fiction podcasts, scholarship (zines), curriculum, poetry, voice notes, curses... find a quick selection below. Full resume / publication list available upon request.
Parthenos: Girls Like Us
In this fiction podcast, the fate of all adolescent girls ends up in the hands of five legendary teenage girls (insert here?) trapped in an underworld locker room. Hell is a teenage girl, but so is god.
PUF: A Completely Factual and Objective History of the Publick Universal Friend
PUF is a period-piece farce - half tale of exquisite queer longing, and half investigation of gender and od. PUF tells the true story of a woman reborn as a nongendered heavenly messenger during the American Revolution, who attempts to prepare humanity for the end of the world.
MEDEAMEDEAMEDEA
MEDEAMEDEAMEDEA rips open Euripides' tragedy to reveal the woman beneath the legend --powerful, divine, and dangerously overlooked. In this bold, new adaptation, Medea is no longer just the scorned woman history remembers, but a force of nature wrestling with the impossible: self versus sacrifice.
The Tragedy of Medusa
This Audible-optioned and multi-award winning play is a queer retelling of the Medusa myth with a focus on Medusa as a survivor of sexual violence. Blending comedy and tragedy, The Tragedy of Medusa gives a survivor the hero's journey and challenges us to look the real monsters in the eye.
DISEM / BODIES
DISEM / BODIES is a scholarship zine based on grant-funded research addressing girlhood in ancient Greece. An investigation into the Greek mythology of the Parthenos alongside the real lived experiences of young women in antiquity -- illustrating that teenage girls today and in antiquity share more than one might think.
theatre
Olivia makes theatre about things that make her angry, hopeful, or both.
As a director, she anchors her practice in ensemble-based and consent-focused pedagogy. By laying an intentional groundwork for a truthful and compassionate theatre-practice, she aims to create a working and performing environment in which exploration of power, privilege, violence, and love is truly possible. Working in classical, contemporary, and devised texts, she believes in performance as a process of practicing a more just and equitable world for actors and audiences alike.
As an intimacy director, she choreographs unconventional and creative intimacy scenes through a pedagogical lens of intersectionality and trauma-informed care. She is especially skilled at navigating scenes of intimate violence, the intersection of sex and slapstick humor, and fantastical hyper-stylized moments of intimacy.
She currently serves as the Artistic Director of Two Cent Lion -- Denver's acclaimed queer media company.
PUF: A Completely Factual and Objective History of the Public Universal Friend
by Olivia Buntaine
The People's Building, Denver
The Tragedy of Medusa
by Olivia Buntaine
The People's Building, Denver
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What You Will (or Twelfth Night)
by William Shakespeare
The Actor's Company / A Noise Within, Los Angeles
Trojan Women
by Euripides
Los Angeles
Selected Intimacy Direction Stills
*full directing and intimacy direction resumes and training available upon request
gossip
"Olivia Buntaine: a store-brand Anne Carson"
- someone somewhere, probably
"Promising young Denver playwright Olivia Buntaine articulates with an uncommonly poignant and at times profound new voice in this fresh examination of the famous Greek myth... It’s charming, engaging and surprisingly affecting."
- John Moore, Denver Gazette
"Olivia is a rare writer that is able to combine deeply meaningful explorations of difficult subjects with a true sense of whimsy. Everything she makes will make you think, will make you laugh, will make you cry; it will make you a more complete human.”
- Lauren Shippen, Creator of The Bright Sessions and Two Thousand and Late
"MEDEAMEDEAMEDEA is so close to a perfect play. It’s no simple task to retell a story that has been told countless times over hundreds of years and manage to say something new, and Buntaine pulls it off spectacularly."
- Splash Magazine
"Perhaps it’s too much to unpack all at once, but it’s also possible that was Buntaine’s point: to overwhelm the viewer with the weight of that intersectionality. To imagine some of today’s most pressing cultural and societal issues in a time so vastly different than present day, and to realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same."
- OnStage Colorado
"Written and directed by Olivia Buntaine, this historical farce (PUF) is both a celebration and an admonition, shaped by writing that is incisive and playfully subversive, and direction that feels boldly imaginative and sharply attuned to the story’s comic undercurrents."
- Curtain Up!
offerings
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