Adriana Sevahn Nichols

Adriana Sevahn Nichols, a native New Yorker, is an award winning actress and playwright. Her play Night Over Erzinga was nominated for the William Saroyan Prize in Playwriting in 2012, which honors outstanding plays about Armenian themes. Her tour de force solo performance piece, Taking Flight, has been thrilling audiences across the country since opening in Los Angeles, in 2006, at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. Hailed as a, “celebration of life,” and “one of the 10 best plays of the year,” Taking Flight has been awarded a San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Womens Theatre Festival Award and the audio CD, produced by LATW, for the Public Radio series, “The Play’s The Thing,” was a finalist for a 2008 Audie Award. Her work has been developed and performed at the Sundance Theater Lab, South Coast Repertory, The Mark Taper Forum, The Goodman Theatre, LA Theatre Works, Stages Theatre, The Fountain Theatre, INTAR, Rio Hondo College, Dixon Place NY, and The Lark. Adriana has been published by Samuel French and Smith & Kraus. She is the recipient of the very first Middle East America Distinguished Playwright Award, which gifted her with a commission, to research and write a new play, inspired by her Armenian grandparent’s survival of the Genocide in 1915. The play, Night Over Erzinga, was developed by the award’s host theatres: The Lark Play Development Center (New York), Silk Road Theatre Project (Chicago), and Golden Thread (San Francisco). It premiered at Golden Thread and Silk Road, respectively, in the Fall Season of 2011 and Spring of 2012. One of Adriana’s biggest passions is bringing theatre and young people together to give them the opportunity to unleash and express their full creative potential. She has taught workshops nationally and internationally most recently at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, ORRAN center for at risk youth in Yerevan, Armenia, CalArts, TEADA, UCSB, and she continues to lead transformational workshops for teenage girls, living in group homes, in Los Angeles.