BIO

Callan is a NYC playwright, who grew up on west coast beaches. She writes about things that puzzle her or make her ask “what the fuck?”. She draws inspiration from the women in her life, studying folklore in Scotland, news articles about weird science discoveries, and the many ways humans have preserved their dead over the millennia.

She writes plays that put women center stage. Her plays delve into all the complex flaws and joys of women pursuing their passions, scrambling for self-determination, and staking claim to space in the world. Her plays are political, because existing as a woman today is political and making decisions as a woman is subversive. They are not loud in your face political plays but plays that do feminism. They show women in all their real complexities, struggling to make something out of their lives, often because they are women, but not always. Always because we are human.

Callan’s work also grows out of her fascination with the persistence of folklore and her time studying oral narrative performers in Scotland. She loves how both storytelling and theatre shout entire worlds into existence and create a shared reality for everyone witnessing the tale, linking audience and performer together in a moment. She loves performances that give the audience magic: emotional magic, stage magic, musical magic, all and any of them. It’s the moment where the audience and actors all breathe together. She loves that. She hopes to tell stories where women can be more than the innocent, the mother, or the witch.

PAST WORK

Her plays include you do not look (Semifinalist O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Fresh Ground Pepper, Denmark Arts Center, The Bechdel Group), LEG (Princess Grace Semifinalist, Hope on Stage Award Finalist, Cherry Lane Theatre 2014 Mentor Project Semifinalist, everything but 3 New Plays, Truffle Theatre Company, 12 Peers Theatre), Girl Becomes Bone (Pipeline Theatre Company), Breathing in the Rain (Columbia University, IATI Cimientos Semifinalist), and A Song for A Surfer (Savage Players, The Vagrancy and LA Female Playwrights Initiative, Truffle Theatre Company). Her children’s plays Brownies, Bicycles & Bigfoot and her adaption of The Jungle Book are both published by YouthPLAYS. The Jungle Book has been performed across the US, UK, Australia, and (English speaking parts of) Africa. She is an alum of Fresh Ground Pepper’s Playground Play Group, an alum of Pipeline Theatre Company’s PlayLab, a member of Lather, Rise, Repeat. She is also a grateful member of The Dramatist Guild. BFA: NYU Tisch, MLitt: University of Aberdeen in Folklore. MFA: Columbia.