Abigail C. Onwunali

I am a Nigerian-American storyteller working across performance, playwriting, poetry, directing, and teaching.

My work is rooted in the belief that stories are living things. They carry memory. They carry history. They carry the people who came before us and the people we have yet to become. I am interested in what happens when we allow those stories to speak through the body, through language, through ritual, and through the imagination.

I make work about people who are trying to become whole in a world that has taught them to divide themselves. My Nigerian and American identities are not separate parts of me; they are in constant conversation. That tension, alongside my fascination with the seen and unseen, the sacred and ordinary, grief and joy, is at the heart of my practice.

Whether I am performing, writing, directing, or teaching, I am interested in creating spaces where people can bring their full selves into the room. I believe theatre can be a place of communion, a place to remember, a place to question, and a place to imagine something that does not yet exist.

I make work that honors where I come from while making room for where we might go.