Star Finch at Crowded Fire Theater & Campo Santo

Playwright

Playwright Star Finch is a native San Franciscan trying her best to hold ground amidst the erasure of gentrification. She’s a member of Campo Santo Theater Company and a resident playwright at Playwrights Foundation. Her plays include H.O.M.E. [Hookers on Mars Eventually] and Bondage (Princess Grace Award semifinalist, Relentless Award honorable mention). She was also the lead writer on the collaborative performance piece Babylon is Burning, a loose adaptation of Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop; and on Death Become Life: Banish Darkness, a collaboration with AXIS Dance, Ensemble Mik Nawooj, and Crowded Fire Theater. Finch has also contributed to various collaborative projects including TheaterFirst’s Participants and Campo Santo’s Ethos de Masquerade. She’s held residencies in Crowded Fire’s R&D LAB and AlterTheater's Alter Lab. She is a recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission in Theater.

Theatres

Crowded Fire produces poetic, bold theater created by new and contemporary artists. We engage
our community by producing adventurous work, innovative in structure, which addresses the
diverse political and social concerns of our audiences.

Founded in 1996, in residence at Intersection since 1997, Campo Santo is an award-winning multi-cultural ensemble committed to developing and premiering new Performance and Theatre and to nurturing diverse new audiences for the performing arts. We cultivate playwrights, fiction writers and poets to work in an intimate, interactive community based setting to create new theatrical experiences that reflect and reinvent our society. Campo Santo is Spanish for sacred ground. Like the roots of our name, we are taking the sacred form of storytelling and using it as a tool to bond community through socially relevant plays. We want to show the audience the world we live in and see in the audience the world we come from. We have nurtured more than 50 World Premieres with a wide range of writers including Junot Diaz, Philip Kan Gotanda, Jessica Hagedorn, Naomi Iizuka, Denis Johnson, and Octavio Solis, to name a few, and nurturing the first works of writers Sharif Abu-Hamdeh, Chinaka Hodge, and Dennis Kim. Most recently we have focused on expanding our definition of what performances and performance spaces can be with the creation of new theatre, music and dance pieces in our year long de Young Museum Artist Residency, for the Trolley Dances and a Mobile Bus Street Art Performance Tour. We have explored this further with great writers as in recently The River a new piece with Richard Montoya that pushed Campo Santo’s trajectory of new works that will include new plays by Luis Alfaro, Chinaka Hodge as well as a series of mobile performances with Denis Johnson and others in non traditional venues.