bursting
saturated
tender
Playwright - Director - Designer - Producer - Songwriter
Video: Starring Vi To; Filmed by Jordan Chafe; Directed and Edited by Ella Talerico; for promotional use for Fruit. by Ella Talerico at the New York Theater Festival, 2023.
Hi! My name is Ella Talerico, I’m originally from Florida, but have also lived in Nashville, and am currently based in Manhattan. I am a lover of all things creative, collective, and alive; a passionate playwright, director, songwriter, poet, filmmaker, producer, actor, and designer. I’m an alum of Ensworth High School and the National Theater Institute (Summer Theater-makers Playwriting, ‘22), and am currently in my senior year at Vassar College, studying Drama.
I have self-produced and directed my original plays It’s Something for Sure!, Birds with Orange Bellies, Salt. Fruit.,Wormball, and Something, Nothing, Diverging. My plays original plays Biophilia, Sandbags, and A Toaster, Some Breadcrumbs, and a Mediocre Answer were commissioned and directed at other educational institutions in the past two years. Recently, I directed The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg and Fury by Sydney Duncan.
My solo performance piece Fruit. was performed at the New York Theater Festival in December of 2023. My solo performance piece Salt. was performed as a part of Vassar’s Steerman Short Play Festival in 2022, and had a performance at Poughkeepsie’s Gallery 40 Beyond the Curves Exhibition in July of 2024.
My work is poetic, saturated, bursting, and tender, often focusing on centering queer and female characters, mental illness, and the perennial battle between hope and despair within us and our community.
I crave to discover all the ways in which individuals and communities create beauty inside ugliness, create stability inside insanity, create hope inside despair. I’m interested in how, why, and where humanity finds the fortitude to search for light and clarity in a world full of pain and confusion. I have an undying curiosity in the beautiful intersection between laughing and crying, and an obsession with the irreconcilable opposites that pervade our existence: the unknown v.s. the known, the uncontrollable v.s. the controlled, and the dead v.s. the living. I believe in theater that believes in humanity, igniting fires of hope, sparking individual and communal revolution. This belief spurs me to create over and over again. I believe the first step to change is having faith that we are capable of change. That we are miraculous in the ways we cope with and overcome our pain. My work is saturated with color and theatricality; it’s fantastical, strange, and explosive. It’s weird. It laughs at itself. It sits in the beautiful place where the cosmos meet the dirt and muck of everyday life. It’s where Waiting for Godot meets Hamlet Machine meets Fleabag meets The Fantasticks.