Theatre Artist and Educator

Who IS She?

Olive Zhang (she/they) is an actor and theater-maker dedicated to creating performances that use humor to explore race relations and American identity. Her works focus on telling stories typically left out of mainstream entertainment, which currently means telling jokes about their parents and growing up in Florida. Olive has great comedic timing, which you can tell because she graduated from CalArts with her Master of Fine Arts in Acting in the middle of a pandemic. After concluding their appointment as the inaugural Emory Arts Fellow in Theater at Emory University, Olive headed up to North Carolina to serve as the 2023-2024 Artist in Residence at Duke Theater, where they premiered a new immersive play, DEI: Discovering Everyone’s Issues. After two years at KU teaching Acting, Devising, and Voice and Speech, Olive made her way to Miami University of Ohio, where she teaches Acting and Experiencing Theatre as a Visiting Assistant Professor. She spends the rest of her time writing, devising, and performing plays about Asian American identity, stereotypes, and how the Grinch is, in fact, Asian (okay, one play about the Grinch, but still).