Anya Pearson is an award-winning playwright, poet, screenwriter, actress, and activist. She is a $10,000 2025 AGE Legacy Playwright Grant Recipient for her play The Killing Fields. A ‘21-22 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, she was also the inaugural winner of the $10,000 Voice is a Muscle Grant from the Corporeal Voices Foundation run by best-selling author Lidia Yuknavitch, for her choreopoem, Made to Dance in Burning Buildings. Made to Dance in Burning Buildings was showcased at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater and received its World Premiere at Shaking the Tree Theatre where Anya was the Playwright-in-Residence for the ‘18-‘19 season. Anya received the $10,000 Problem Play Commission to adapt Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure focused on mass incarceration of black bodies and the other numerous failings of our criminal justice system. Her adaptation, The Measure of Innocence, was selected for the 2020 Kilroys List, won the 2020 Drammy Award for Best Original Script, and was a Finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Drama. Anya was the first person of African-American descent to be nominated for the Oregon Book Award for Drama. Anya was a finalist for Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program (2023), for the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting at Brown University (2020), and the National Black Theatre’s Playwriting Residency (2019). She is currently under commission at Portland Center Stage and Many Hats. Her plays The Killing Fields and Without a Formal Declaration of War received developmental workshops in 2024 through Urban Haiku in association with Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts and The New Group in New York City. She has received residencies through UCROSS and Kripalu. She is the Artistic Director of We Are Urban Haiku, an online writing center and community that works to actively decolonize writing pedagogy and practice while increasing accessibility and centering the global majority. Her poetry is featured in Electric Literature. She is currently writing a four-play cycle reimagining the Oresteia through an African American lens, her memoir, a novel, two pilots, a short and a feature, and constantly plotting, planning, devising, creating, imagining, and revising visions of a better, more just world.