Nikki Appino

For three decades, Nikki Appino, a multi-disciplinary theater artist and filmmaker, has refined her career as a director, writer, and producer for stage and screen.

Her art has been recognized through commissions and grants, including the Pew Center for Arts & Culture, the Flintridge Foundation, Paul Allen Foundation, Artist Trust, and the National Endowment for the Arts/TCG Fellowship.

In the 90's she founded a company to develop and produce original theater and film works. From 1998 to 2003, she created over ten original pieces for the stage including, Invisible Ink, Before the Comet Comes, Rain City Rollers, and Djinn.

"Each of writer-director Appino’s pieces has had its own singular style.  But running through much of her original work from the visually grand Djinn, to the more intimate Invisible Ink and Project X are currents of melancholy…humor, and a human-scale approach to epic subjects."—The Seattle Times

Appino has collaborated with a range of artists and composers, including Eyvind Kang, Robin Holcomb, Tenzin Choegyal, Wayne Horvitz, and Philip Glass. Her directing credits include Robin Holcomb’s Silent Spring (Walker Center, Wexner, Flynn Center, Dance Theater Workshop) and early directing credits at A.C.T., Milwaukee Rep, McCarter Theatre, Perseverance Theatre, the Empty Space, On The Boards, and Berkeley Rep.

From 2010 to 2013, Appino worked with the International Women’s Partnership for Peace and Justice in Thailand teaching generative theatre and media production. She has worked with major media outlets and nonprofits including NBC, Discovery Channel, LifeMed Media, Temple Contemporary, Wharton School of Business and Triple Threat TV. With her present company she directed and produced the documentaries A Girls' Gotta Ride (about women and the rodeo) and American Rimpoche: A Tibetan Lama in the Twenty-first Century (about the arrival of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, music by Philip Glass).

Her performance work with Saori Tsukada, Club Diamond, was selected for the Sundance TheatreMakers Residency and its Theatre Lab at MassMoCA. Club Diamond premiered at the Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theater in New York City, and it played at the Days and Night Festival in Big Sur, California and across the US.

She currently has two projects in development: White Lama, inspired by the disappearance of explorer and mystic Theos Bernard, and Transcontinental, a musical myth about two women in love at a 1936 roller derby contest.

Photo by Bill Bernstein