Bio

Nessa Norich is a Philadelphia-based writer, director, and performer who generates experimental narratives for screen and stage. Process-driven, Nessa develops her work within community arts projects designed to open pathways to collective empowerment through performance, embodied research, critical thought, and political education. Blending vivid visual poetry with satire, Nessa’s work imagines intimacies forged on the margins.

Nessa Norich produces work internationally while calling Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Philadelphia home. Over the last fifteen years, she has presented works at notable venues across the U.S., India, the UK, and Europe, including a her most recent exhibition at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw.

Nessa’s short film, Jelly Bean, was a recipient of the 2022 NYC Women’s Fund for Media, and screened at 23 international festivals. Nessa has developed works at The Getty Villa, The Orchard Project, Mount Tremper Arts and NACL residencies. Nessa is an alum of NYU/Tisch School of the Arts, Jacques Lecoq, Barnard College, Film at Lincoln Center's 2026 Artists Academy, The Somatic School, the Emerge NYC fellowship, and the New York Neo-Futurists.

Being a hyphenate artist has led her to opportunities like guest-starring in HBO’s High Maintenance while producing a morning rave that was featured in the same production. Nessa has starred in several feature length and short films and has written, directed and performed in dozens of critically acclaimed original plays internationally at such notable venues as Joe’s Pub, NY Live Arts, the Edinburgh Fringe, the Louvre, British Film Institute, A.R.T and the Bushwick Starr. Nessa won a 2016 NY Innovative Theater Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical for Steve: A Docu-Musical, which was featured and praised in the NY Times as, “a work of art”. The adaptation of Hamlet that she devised and directed, The Rub, was selected for the New Orleans Fringe. Huffington Post called it “the most innovative, gripping and intriguing version of Hamlet that I’ve see to date”.

When she is not creating her own work she supports other artists through creative coaching and teaching. Nessa is an alum of Emerge NYC and the NY Neo-Futurists. She is a graduate of Jacques Lecoq International School of Theatre in Paris and received her B.A from Barnard College. Her teaching credits include Columbia University, Parsons, The New School, Children’s Theater Company and Crossingpoint Arts.

Artist Statement

I am an interdisciplinary director, writer and choreographer. I approach storytelling as a sublime pathway to break with convention, and safely transgress, subvert, question and explore our present reality.

Part of my role as a queer white Ashkenazi Jewish artist is to communicate and translate the complexities of identity and existence. Integral to my process, is juxtaposing and remembering fragments of history, tradition, myth and ancestry. I include in my own ancestry those who share the intersecting lineages of my identity: my ethnic ancestors and the queer and artist pioneers whose legacies made my existence possible. Developing work in communities, non-traditional spaces and mixing mediums allows me to create dynamic and singular stories, while finding multiple entry points for my collaborators and audiences.

To generate new narratives and adaptations, I juxtapose source material in a collage style to create an uncanny world of the references we are all familiar with but do not necessarily experience as parts of a whole reality.  I use popular culture references, academic discourse, verbatim text from interviews, found sound bytes, and original sound design. The work is developed through movement, improvisation, gesture the architecture of the performers' bodies and the topography of the performance space. My approach to process: research, play, embody and generate with specificity.