This year we are welcoming Anna Crace to the family! Anna is the new director for Holy Family Theater and is currently directing the fall one-act. She came to Holy Family with the hope to help students discover their love of theater. Anna’s high school director changed her life, and is the reason that Anna pursued theater. Now, she is able to inspire high school students, just as her director did.  In her words,  “Theater doesn’t have to be something you do after school, it can become your life.”

As many people can tell from Anna’s accent, she is indeed British. Anna was born in London and grew up in the London theater scene. She has an undergrad in drama at Manchester and majored in writing for performance and dramaturgy masters. After college, she wrote plays in London that were performed at the Lyric Hammersmith theater. As Anna gained writing and directing experience she had an idea to create her own theater company. This dream became a reality and she created Lo/fall theater company.  This company brought together emerging writers who merged their different perspectives to create new stories.  Eventually, Anna got a directing masters because she wanted to hone her craft. In Minnesota she has directed shows at the Guthrie and Jungle Theater, and now Anna is here at Holy Family.

For the 2020 season Anna selected fairy tales shows. The fall one-act will be “Orange is the New Glass” and the spring musical will be “Into the Woods.” Anna chose the fairy tale theme because, “2020 has just been such a depressing year, and it would be nice to live in a different world for a bit.” Her goals for Holy Family are to create very exciting seasons that people want to be a part of and to show the audience different styles of theater. Anna wants to show others the whole world of theater: you can act, direct, you can do tech, and there are many jobs in theater that do not get spoken about. Her words of advice are, “You never stop learning, so even when you think you’ve reached your best you can always be better. Keep going to workshops, keep auditioning because you will always get better and learn new stuff, and see as much theater as you can… once we’re out of the covid world.”