Vanessa Grise (born June 27, 1976) is a playwright and director.

Quotes

• …Stylistic elements that have become characteristic of my work, such as repetition and the collapsing of time and space, are reflections of how I move in the world. I have never arrived anywhere in a straight line so I don’t know how to tell a story in that way. I want to write plays that are in a constant state of motion: music playing, voices overlapping, and bodies that can’t stop dancing, which to me is the same as dreaming…
  • On her common writing style in “Que Onda? with Virginia Grise” (HOWLROUND THEATRE COMMONS; 2015 Nov 19)

• …Ceremony and ritual were really part of my everyday: ancestor worship, talk story, limpias, the incense, tirando cartas, and countless visits to the curandera (because my mother was convinced I had the badness inside of me). I thought all of it was magic, even when the curandera spit holy water in my face. Being brown was magic. When you go to a really good curandera, something inside of you shifts energetically. As an artist, I want to be able to have that type of impact on people.
  • On her aim as an artist in “Que Onda? with Virginia Grise” (HOWLROUND THEATRE COMMONS; 2015 Nov 19)

• …I am an anxious person by nature, full of fear and insecurities. Those early years of figuring out how to make a living in theatre are hard and while my anxieties, fear and insecurities have not gone away, I proved to myself that I could make a living as an artist. Now I want to learn how to be a good artist, a really fucking good artist…
  • On her evolution as an artist in “Virginia Grise” (50 Playwrights; 2016 Feb 23)

• …As a queer brown woman from a working class family, making a living as an artist was an important goal for me to accomplish. In addition to being very determined, I have also been very fortunate…
  • On her successes in “Virginia Grise” (50 Playwrights; 2016 Feb 23)