Martavius
Parrish

The Bio

Martavius Parrish is a Black, Queer, Queens-based director, producer, and creative multipotentialite whose work spans theater, opera, music, movement, and film. He was most recently the director of the well-reviewed Edinburgh Fringe’s Letters to Joan. Prior to that, he made his Off-Broadway directing debut with Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation or, The Re-Education of Undine (which received 3 AUDELCO nominations, including Best Revival of a Play and a win for Best Featured Actress in a Play). He’s developed several new works with The Dramatists Guild, American Opera Projects, Cry Havoc, and the New York Shakespeare Exchange and was on the artistic team of Lincoln Center Theater. Next up, he’s collaborating with the Grammy-nominated songwriter & award-winning filmmaker, Diovanna Obafunmilayo, on her masterpiece GODBODY with The Theater Offensive, a Tony-nominated organization in Boston dedicated exclusively to producing liberating queer and trans works.

 

Previous Associate Director credits include the 6-time Tony-nominated revival of Into The Woods (Broadway, Limited Engagement Tour, & City Center Encores!), Once Upon A Mattress (Broadway, LA, & City Center Encores!), Ragtime (City Center Encores!), Oliver! (City Center Encores!), and Disney’s Hercules (Development Workshop), as well as productions with the McCarter Theatre Center, Cincinnati Playhouse, and Out of the Box Theatrics. He’s a 2024 Drama League Directing Fellow & Inaugural NYU Tisch Department of Design for Stage and Film Directors Fellow.

 

As a performer, Martavius is currently performing in Sally and Tom at the ZACH Theatre in Austin, Texas. Other select credits include A Christmas Carol & The Inheritance - Part I & II (ZACH Theatre), The Color Purple (Portland Center Stage), The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (Arkansas Repertory Theatre), & Priscilla Queen of the Desert (Ogunquit Playhouse, Gateway Playhouse). Additionally, he’s performed at Carnegie Hall, The Beacon Theatre, Yankee Stadium, Symphony Space, & 54 Below.

 

He holds a Bachelors of Science in Neuroscience from Duke University, as well as a Masters of Music in Vocal Performance from NYU Steinhardt. 

 

The Artist

Cultivated from an expressively Southern-American lineage and upbringing, the foundation of his creativity has been forged as a refuge and engine of opposition to religiously and racially oppressive systems, which has evolved into an unabashed curiosity to interrogate, dissect, and deconstruct societally prescribed confines. His work reframes an artist’s responsibility as a divine edict to guide humanity back to self-recognition (and, thus, inherent value) in the “other” through discerning and restorative engagement with their truths. His interpretations champion the emphasis of the subversive perspective of the marginalized as an imperative default. Through his own reclamation of spirituality, vulnerability, ancestral excellence, community, and sensuality, his interpretations synthesize a studied history of craftsmanship with an intentionally disruptive remixing of ideologies inspired by the historied ingenuity and resilience of the Black and Brown artists before him.

 

His work’s voice is characterized by its sleek, but muscular aesthetic of stylistic movement and harmoniously integrated transitions that call upon his background of neuroscience with principles of mirroring and innate cognition as visually subtextual debris. Driven by an acute reverence for the balance of rigor and romp, he uses playful invitation and the kinetic psychology of distance, gesture, viewpoint, rhythm, and spontaneity to entice his audience toward increasingly expansive empathy through the portals of familiarity and intuitive legibility. His creative north stars are experiences that are jubilantly ravenous in their audacity, analytically meticulous in their excavation, and explosively activating in their transmission.