Nikki Appino

For over four decades, Nikki Appino, a multi-disciplinary artist, has refined her career as a director, writer, photographer and producer for stage and screen.

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

"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; and a range of institutions including; Under the Radar Festival, Days and Nights Festival, UPenn Wharton, the Annenberg Center and Sundance. 

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, and Triple Threat TV. She directed and produced the documentaries A Girl’s 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, with 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, it played at the Days and Night Festival in Big Sur, California and across the US.

Her two projects - The Improbable Legacy of Theos Bernard, 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 are alive in limbo…

Photo by Bill Bernstein