VANESSA OGBUEHI is a director and performer of new and devised work, mixing clown, narrative, and spectacle to elevate everyday stories to mythic proportions. Most recently, she assistant directed Heartbeat Opera’s Lady M, which the New York Times called “Flat-out brilliant.” While the inaugural Director of Digital, Film, & Interactive Media at Pig Iron Theatre Company, she collaborated with filmmaker Josephine Decker on The Path of Pins or The Path of Needles, an immersive performance exploring fairy tales and motherhood. Other past collaborators include Double Edge Theatre and The Bearded Ladies Cabaret. University direction includes Orlando (Boston University), Metamorphoses (Villanova), and Resilient: Black Bottom (Drexel), a student-written piece about the university's 1960s expansion atop a thriving black neighborhood. Vanessa was recently awarded a 2023 Drama League Assistantship, paired with Dawn Monique Williams for the world premiere of Welcome to Matteson at New Jersey Repertory Theatre. She holds a Graduate Certificate in Devised Performance from Pig Iron Theatre Company.
I'm a director who loves to build things from the ground up alongside a handful of brave collaborators. I make intimate spectacles that elevate everyday stories to the level of myth. By giving our strangest, most impossible dreams the space they deserve, we can chart bold new paths for personal and social transformation.
Hey, I'm Vanessa!
Reveling in the freedom to be a mess.
I make work for intimate spaces — studios, churches, community centers, barns — where you can feel and heal under the collective warmth of strangers. Through uncanny spectacle and absurdist experiments in language, voice, music, and physical theatre, I take people’s (mostly) true life stories and elevate them the level of myth.
My aim is to throw audiences head-first into the magic space between the ordinary and the extraordinary. I lure them in with nostalgia before using a surprise twist to awaken their senses to new futures. New realities. Worlds they secretly long for but never knew existed. The experience is often confrontational, but eventually delightful. Food and drink always helps.
Storytelling is a survival tactic when I forget how to dream, hope, and fight. It’s a ritual that connects us to an expansive energy that helps us all imagine and re-imagine ourselves and our world anew.