About Gillian:
Theatre Maker
Educator
Activist
Solo Performance
Through productions such as Mad Like Us and Clean Start, Gillian Hemme draws from real-life narratives of women to create original multi-character performance. Whether the inspiration comes from interviews (Clean Start and Unescorted) or myth and family lore (Mad Like Us), Gillian is committed to finding ways fictional retelling can amplify the core truths of personal narratives.
Teaching Artistry
Gillian is a proud member of the teaching team at Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston. She teaches improvisation, scene study, and story theatre to artists of all ages, interests, and experience levels.
Radical Joy
Gillian understands the power of play and the ways in which play can be applied to social practice. Inspired by the Actors’ Gang Prison Project and her undergraduate work with Grinnell College’s Liberal Arts in Prison Program, she and Beth Voitik, LCSW, co-founded Piven’s theatre program at Cook County Jail. Today, that program exists as EPIC (Ensemble Play in Corrections), and Gillian remains the director of EPIC.
Since the fall of 2016, Gillian has hosted PLAYT, a semi-regular potluck dinner series at her apartment. PLAYT (originally called Empanadas and Activism, thanks to Cafe Tola’s early support) combines play (usually in the form of theatre games), a potluck dinner, and a robust conversation where people get to practice respectfully disagreeing with one another.
With generous support from DCASE and ACTA, Gillian published Drawing Our Sky, a collaborative children’s book designed to be used during parent-child visits at carceral facilities. The book features original artwork and calligraphy by the EPIC ensemble and is freely available to children and families impacted by incarceration.
Stage, Story, and Screen
Gillian has had the pleasure of performing with a number of stellar companies around Chicago - Piven, Prologue, Jubilee, Prop Thtr - and in Rhinofest and the Chicago Fringe Festival. She has also performed on the world stage in Taiwan with Riverbed Theatre Company at the International Theatre Festival
More recently, she has been enjoying Chicago’s rich storytelling circuit, telling tales onstage with Loose Chicks, tenx9 Chicago, The Moth, and Bughouse.
Thanks to her wonderful team at Big Mouth Talent, Gillian has appeared on-screen in television and commercial projects, including Chicago Fire (NBC), Mind Games (ABC), and The Onion News Network. Gillian is happy to be a card-carrying member of SAG-Aftra, making her apartment a #proudunionhome.