About 🔎
Averi Israel (she, her) is a writer/director/producer from the eight cities that raised her. She moved to New York to pursue a Film Studies degree from Columbia University, where she graduated as the class recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts. After school, she moved to South Korea where she worked as an English teacher during the day and designed sets for Seoul Shakespeare Company in the evening.
Back in NYC, she is cultivating a career at the intersection of art and activism, exploring themes of race, gender, sexuality, violence, and love in the context of American culture. As a writer, her pieces for stage and film consist primarily of historical fiction works highlighting obscured corners of the Black experience, seeking to root our contemporary moment in both its foundational past and visionary future.
She is a 2022 recipient of the New York Foundation of the Arts Women’s Fund for Media Music and Theatre, a member of Theatre Producers of Color Cohort III, a 2023 Athena Film Festival Writers Lab participant, a 2024 Tallgrass Artist Resident, and a co-producer on the George C. Wolfe Broadway revival of Gypsy.
“Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.”
Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds