About

ABOUT

Anya Martin is a playwright, director, producer and arts leader.

Welcome, and thanks for visiting my website.

In Mennonite youth camp’s second grade cabin talent show, I chased a mustache-twisting devil off the stage, and realized that theater was how I was brave. Since leaving my rural farming community for Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama, and from there to NYC and Sarah Lawrence College, my artistic journey has often bridged seemingly diametrical realities of rural and urban perspectives. My work often weaves seemingly unrelated worlds together with a heart for social justice and America’s rural communities, alongside a passion for the aggressively theatrical.

I am also drawn to juxtapositions of historical perspectives that duel and sing with our contemporary and personal narratives, and in some styles of my work I incorporate primary source material with original writings, alongside physical and imagistic staging.

Currently, I live in Pittsburgh also known as the “Paris of Appalachia.” (Which feels about right, doesn’t it?) And while I feel deeply connected to the farmland from which I grew, and to this city which has nurtured me, my theatrical perspectives and artistic curiosity are ever expanding. I hope my work and the stories, people and themes explored within them surprise, challenge and move you.

Thanks for stopping by. The internet is a very busy place. I’m honored.

Anya

Anya Martin is a playwright and theatre-thinker whose works have been praised as “smart, sharp and witty” (City Paper) with “scenes of imagination and poetic insight.” (Pittsburgh Post Gazette) that will “alternately rouse you and break your heart,” (City Paper.)

Recently, Martin’s play, “The President’s Pants (and Buchanan’s Peace)” an absurdist dramedy about Mennonites, the ghost of President James Buchanan, and the costs of “peace,” was a Semi-Finalist for the 2024 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. “The President’s Pants” was also a winner in the Madison New Works Lab at James Madison University, which included a staged reading and a two-week artist residency in Harrisonburg, VA.Also in 2024, Martin’s play “In Our Time: Pandemic Stories from the Front Lines” inspired by Hemingway’s novel and her interviews with ICU physicians was presented in several staged readings in partnership with City of Asylum, Carnegie Stage, The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and Hiawatha Project.

Martin’s “Buoyant Sea,” an immersive tactile play premiered in a sold out run with The Pittsburgh International Children’s Theatre Festival in 2023, and was awarded the prestigious Artistic Innovation Award at the TYA/USA national conference in March of 2024. Her play “Bloom” about a young Mennonite girl’s experience with puberty and adolescence inside the realm of her mother’s garden was a prestigious “Second Rounder” in the 2023 Austin Film Festival.

Her 10 minute play, “Demeter’s Fracked Heart and the Emerald Ash Borer” was a winner with Sienna College’s 2024 Climate Justice Plays. Her short play “Helen at the Gym,” about a tragic real-life femicide mass shooting in Pittsburgh was selected for the New Play Development Workshop, at the national ATHE conference in 2023. This play was also a 2018 RedBull Annual Short Play winner presented at the Lucille Lortel and is published with Stage Rights alongside works by Tina Howe, Arthur Kopit, Dael Orlandersmith, and Doug Wright. Her monologue “Like a Dog” was just published with Fresh Words: An International Literary Magazine in 2024, and her monologue “The Coochie” was selected for the 2023 Some1Speaking Series. She is a 2021 Silver Ear winner in the Hear Me Out Monologue Competition for “Mother(land) Will Teach You That.”

Martin was the Founding Artistic Director and Producer, as well as lead playwright and director, for Hiawatha Project a multi-award winning, original theater-making company based in Pittsburgh, PA for 15 years. With Anya’s leadership Hiawatha Project proudly received foundational support from the AER Capacity Building, The August Wilson Center Legacy Fund, August Wilson Center Programming Fund, Brooks Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, Heinz Small Arts Initiative, The McKinney Foundation, Off The Wall Foundation, Opportunity Fund, The Sprout Fund, PA Council on the Arts, and The Pittsburgh Foundation.

She earned her BFA from Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, and MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a member of The Pittsburgh Public Playwrights Collective, The New Play Exchange, The Playwrights Center, and The Dramatists Guild. Before running away to theater school, Martin grew up in a rural Mennonite family in the Pennsyltucky part of PA. She now resides in Pittsburgh, PA with her two children, husband, small dog, and garden.