Phoenix Festival Playbill 2025 (1) - Flipbook - Page 46
WHO’S WHO: THE ARTISTS
CLARA FRANCESCA (Resident Artist)
Clara Francesca, is stage and screen actor, singer, XR performance
artist, C-Suite Public Speaking Coach and professor. She holds a
Juris Doctorate and Biomedical Sciences Degree, is the winner of the
American Australian Association Dame Joan Sutherland Fund for
Performance Excellence, the recipient of The Austrian-American
Federal Assistance Award for her artistry as co-founder with Anne
Wichmann of The Extended Reality Ensemble (XRE), won Best Actress at the Arts Centre
Fairfax Stage for self-devised piece Susan Who? and has solo show Making Marx proudly
directed by Laurence Olivier Award Winner Guy Masterson (The Shark Is Broken Broadway/
West End). Clara has been featured on PBS, FBI (CBS) opposite Jeremy Sisto, and New
Amsterdam (NBC) opposite Ryan Eggold. Most recently, Clara was credited in Micharne
Cloughley’s published play 43 Stages of Grieving: A Comedy launched at The Drama Bookshop as the originating cast, featured at The Queens Museum for Jerome Fellow Umber
Majeed’s exhibit J Y TECH, and spoke at the Berlin MANIFEST:IO Symposium with fellow
panelists Martin Binder and Alex Hawthorn (Theater Mitu). Clara is a proud Museum of
The Moving Image (MOMI) XR educator, Microdose VR collaborator, and Anne Bogart SITI
Company’s Inaugural Conservatory Alumnus. www.clarafrancesca.com
GAVIN ROBERTSON (Playwright)
Gavin Robertson comes from a physical theatre background (Jacques Lecoq, Philippe Gaulier,
Lindsay Kemp,) creating original works for national & international touring. He has produced a
diverse portfolio of productions including Spittoon, The Three Musketeers, The Six-Sided
Man, Fantastical Voyage (via Ray Harryhausen), Escape From The Planet of The Day That
Time Forgot!, Mata Hari Female Spy and many others, infamously, Thunderbirds F.A.B. (via
Gerry Anderson) which played in London's West End on six separate occasions, plus international
tours, between 1989 and 2001, as well as the 昀椀rst-ever stage production of Day Of The Trif昀椀ds.
Many of his productions have toured internationally including several tours to Japan, Australia,
New Zealand, USA, Brazil, Singapore as well as Hong Kong, Lebanon, Turkey, Oman, and various
European countries. Notably he played ‘Juror 12’ in the award-winning UK production of 12 Angry
Men, with Bill Bailey and a host of TV comedians
which also toured to Australia and New Zealand.
He played London’s West End with Hollywood
actor Christian Slater, as ‘Frank Scanlon’ in two
seasons of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
He has twice received the writing bursary from
Escape To Create in Seaside, Florida, USA. He
is a former Drama Advisor to the Arts Council
of England.
