Kari Barclay

Cleveland, Ohio

Kari Barclay (they/them) is a playwright, director, and theater maker interested in deepening audiences’ sense of time and sparking curiosity about sexuality and gender. Based in Cleveland, Ohio, they teach a new generation of artists at Oberlin College and craft plays in the Midwest and beyond.  

Kari’s original comedy Can I Hold You? was one of the first full-length plays about asexuality performed in the U.S. and enjoyed a sold-out run in San Francisco and workshop in New York. It has been taught at colleges and universities across the country and published in Marathi language translation. Kari’s play Stonewallin’ was the winner of the 2021 Southern Queer Playwriting Festival and opened at Richmond Triangle Players in February 2022. New projects include a solo show about sexuality and crossword puzzles, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac around a seventh-century genderqueer poet, and a meditation on wildfire and queer history in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In their other life, Kari is a theater scholar and historian with a focus on politics and performance. Their nonfiction book, Directing Desire, examines the rise of consent-based approaches to staging sex in contemporary theater, known as intimacy choreography. Kari earned their PhD in Theater and Performance Studies in 2021 from Stanford University, where they studied with playwright Young Jean Lee. They are an alum of the Humanity in Action Fellowship, the Headlands Center for the Arts Artists Residency, and Directors Lab North. kari-barclay.com.  Instagram at @karibarclay