Lisa Dwan is an Irish performer, director & writer. Having originally trained in the UK as a ballet dancer, including dancing with Rudolf Nureyev in Coppelia in Dublin, & The London Lewis Ballet Company she began acting professionally in her teens. She has worked extensively in theatre, film, and television, both internationally and in her native Ireland. She is currently shooting a new T.V series for Netflix called TOP BOY produced by Drake & Lebron James. She has just completed staring in Harold Pinters ‘The Lover & The Collection’ at STC in Washington DC where she won the 2018 - 2019 Emery Battis award for outstanding contribution to acting.
Dwan writes, presents, lectures and teaches regularly on theatre, culture, gender and Beckett (BBC radio and television, NPR, the Guardian, the Telegraph, École Normale Supérieure, Trinity College Dublin , Reading University, MIT, Oxford University, Cambridge University, Princeton, NYU and has held a teaching position at Columbia University for the past two years. She recently completed a documentary for the BBC on Beckett and Dante and has been commissioned to write a book on Beckett for Virago. In 2017 she held the Atelier residency in Princeton University teaching a course on Becketts prose work.
Dwan is currently a fellow at MIT Arts and was a fellow at the School of Art and Ballet at New York University in 2017-2018. In 2018-2019, she was alos a distinguished artist in residence at Columbia University, where she is teaching at the Institute of Women and Gender studies and developing a new theatre piece with Colm Toibin based on Antigone. It will have its world premiere at The Gate Theatre in Dublin this November, as well as a new version of Medea which she is co-writing with Margaret Atwood.