Vanessa Oakes

Vanessa Oakes trained as a theatre designer and worked extensively in scenography, community arts and arts administration before becoming a full-time writer, designer and freelance producer.

She writes plays and text for a wide variety of people and spaces. Her words have been performed in theatres, art galleries and museums, community spaces, coal vaults, beneath a ring road, in an award-winning bungalow and at Latitude.

Vanessa is a member of Royal Opera House’s Engender Network and of WGGB.

Current projects include:  Songs for Survivors of the 21st C with Vahan Salorian (composer).

Opera: Her Day (librettist) with Sayan Kent (composer) premiered March 2022 for Coventry City of Culture.  

Plays include: Mademoiselle F (the estate), Me, Nic & Jo (Meander Theatre), All Is Well (the estate), A New Way of Living (andsome), Runaway Boy (Teatro Youth Theatre), Do What You Do (Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery Centenary community tour), The Oracle of the Taprooms (George Eliot Writer in Residence), The Game Anew (Pentabus), The Watched Sea (CAPITAL), The Permitted Number (Paines Plough), I Am Active (Red Teapot), The Kindness of Strangers (Warwick Words), Lost in Paradise CV6 (Belgrade Theatre), A Body Moving Through (the estate), Live Like Us (Belgrade Theatre).

For BOLDtext Open Door @ Birmingham Repertory Theatre: Bill the B***ard (UNCOMMON WEALTH), Offences Against the Person (THE SENTENCE), Taking Care of Business (A Mouthful of Rhinestones), The Invariant Right (INSATIABLE), Mademoiselle F (DISORDER) Glastonbury (EUROTRASHED), All Is Well (Doubled Up), The Arnolfini Portrait (LEAP), I’m Staying (Sunstroke), an act of determining the total number of something (The Russell Brand Effect), The Other Me (Selfies),  A Diary Without Dates (Rep Night One).

For BOLDtext: A Toast to Truth and Nature (Power of Invention) @ Soho House Museum), What Do You Want? (FOLLOW ME) Birmingham Weekender in Digbeth, Twitty (BEHIND BARS Ghosts of the Lock-Up) @ Steelhouse Lane. 

Vanessa has been a Theatre Absolute Associate since 2015.

Find out more on Vanessa’s website