Mari Crawford (like calamari) is an actress, writer, and comedian based in NYC. She is the winner of the Bounce Emerging Artist Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the award for Best Autobiographical One-Woman Show at the United Solo Off-Broadway Festival for Bipolar Badass. It premiered at the 2023 Asheville Fringe Festival, has been performed at the West End Theatre, and headlined the Bounce Arts Festival in Northern Ireland. In 2024 she preformed Bipolar Badass at the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) NYC and Off-Broadway twice at Theatre Row and the Soho Playhouse, selling out all three performances. The show was given an encore performance at Theatre Row. Mari recently starred as Emily Webb in Our Town at the Fort Salem Theater.
She is passionate about de-stigmatizing Serious Mental Illness (SMI) and has partnered with organizations like the National Alliance on Mental Illness-NYC, and the University of Atypical in Belfast, Ireland, a disabled-led arts charity that takes an empowerment based approach towards supporting disabled people's involvement in the arts. Future partnerships include with ACL, a NY statewide non-profit providing rehabilitation services to 48,000 people diagnosed with serious and persistent psychiatric disabilities. Mari has been featured on BBC WorldWide, NPR, and WNYC. Her work in writing for includes being a staff writer for Netflix Comedian Sammy Obeid's KO Comedy. Mari has written three short films and two feature length scrips, please reach out on the contact page for more information. She has performed stand-up at several clubs in NYC, being featured in line-ups including Tiffany Haddish and Ilana Glazer. She was featured in The Last OG on TBS, making her SAG-AFTRA Eligible and has been in several commercials and independent films, as well as some voiceover work. Please reach out on the contact page for bookings. She is an alumna of the New York State Summer School for the Arts School of Theatre, the British American Drama Academy, and Bard College where she received the Don Parker Award for Excellence in Theater Performance for her work highlighting mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. She has served in AmeriCorps and is a singer-songwriter who plays violin, guitar, and piano. |