Lauren Rayner { Executive Producer }

Lauren Rayner is a storyteller and experiments by telling stories in various creative mediums. Lauren holds a Juris Doctor degree from Brooklyn Law School and she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Applied Theatre Arts in Education from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Prior to the study of law, Lauren built her career as an independent freelance producer. While at USC she re-developed the Women's Theatre Organization and served as President for three years. Lauren thrives in new play development and directed four of her own pieces in Los Angeles and has cultivated the development and produced over twenty five new works by fellow female artists since 2006. In 2007, her play Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously received a roundtable reading at the Lark Play Development Center in New York. For two years, Lauren was a leading troupe member of MRS Degree Improv, USC's only all female improv troupe.

Lauren has a solid foundation in classical texts. In 2004, she was selected for the Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship. She produced and directed adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream (2004) and Macbeth (2005) and took both productions to the Mary Folger Shakespeare Festival in Washington, D.C. receiving the Brian Cabe Award for Excellence in Directing for two consecutive years. In December 2007, Lauren directed and produced an all female production of King Lear. In 2008, Lauren studied abroad in London at the British American Drama Academy with a focus on Classical and Restoration texts and stage combat.

After graduating from USC, Lauren spent a number of years working in the Off-Broadway theatre world. In New York, she interned at the Cherry Lane Theatre (Fundraising & Development), The Play Company (General Management), Women's Expressive Theatre (Production), the Lark Play Development Center (Artistic/Producing) and the Ontological-Hysterical Theater (Production & Box Office) and in Los Angeles at the Center Theatre Group in the Executive Offices under Artistic Director, Michael Ritchie. Since 2008, Lauren has produced work at Joe’s Pub at the Public, Incubator Arts Project, PS 122, Barrow Street Theatre, Theater for the New City, HERE, the New Ohio Theatre, Dixon Place, Ars Nova, the Living Theatre, Kraine Theatre, Red Room, Under St. Marks, Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 4th Street Theatre, The Shell Theatre, The 45th Street Theatre, The Secret Theatre, Bridge Theatre, Theatre 54, Madame X, and The Cutting Room. 

In July 2009, she had her NYC directorial debut with Roots & Wings Theatrical in their annual Duct Tape & A Dream Festival of new works and has since directed six shows for the company. In August 2009, Lauren was invited onto the Board of Directors and currently serves as Marketing Director and is currently producing their 7th annual festival. In November 2009, Lauren produced ACTIVATE! the launch event for Theatre C and has held various positions within the company for the past four years (Producing Associate, General Manger) and currently serves as Executive Producer with Artistic Director Carlos Armesto. Theatre C produced Jesse Zaritt’s BINDING in the soloNOVA Arts Festival in May 2010, winning 3 NY Innovative Theatre Awards (Best Choreography, Best Solo-Performer, Best Performance Art Production) and was extended by PS 122 and the terraNOVA Collective. She was on the producing team for Kyoung H. Park's disOriented at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre in February 2011, nominated for Best Choreography at the NY Innovative Theatre Awards. In October 2010, Lauren ventured into booking commercial theatre as an Associate Producer with VoiceChair Productions led by Executive Producer Erich Jungwirth. In Winter 2011, Lauren re-joined the staff at the Lark Play Development Center in the General Management department and managed their new studio spaces on 43rd Street. She also returned to the two-time Obie Award-winning The Play Company as the Marketing & Outreach Associate striving to elevate the company’s organizational profile until she left to fully pursue her freelancing career in July 2012.

Since becoming a full-time freelance producer, Lauren lived in Scotland for a month to produce for Brain Melt Consortium’s production of Daughters of Lot presented in the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, receiving a 4-Star review in The Scotsman. She line produced the Grand Opening of the new home of Lark Play Development Center which included multiple readings of plays written specifically for the event by such luminaries as David Henry Hwang, Arthur Kopit, Theresa Rebeck, Rajiv Joseph, Tina Howe (among others) and coordinated filming with a moving multiple-camera set up for live streaming the evening around the world via VirtualArtsTV. Lauren was then invited onto the VirtualArtsTV team as the VP of Artistic Production and line produced their first ever live-streamed performing arts festival, the WiredArts Fest at the Secret Theatre, which streamed live to over 50,000 viewers. She loves re-imagining classic texts and produced Ionesco’s The Future Is in Eggs and Pirandello’s Sicilian Limes, which integrated mobile audio streaming technology at The Shell Theatre in Times Square in Summer of 2011. Other revised classics include producing sold-out runs of Sartre’s Huis Clos (“No Exit”) at the 45th Street Theatre in Fall 2012, Feydeau’s L’hotel du Libre Echange (“Paradise Hotel”) at Theatre 54 in Summer 2013 and Ionesco’s La Cantatrice Chauve (“The Bald Soprano”) in Fall 2014 at the 4th Street Theatre, all presented in the original French with supertitles in English directed by Roxane Revon.

TAKE ME HOME, the show set in a taxi, has been {LRP}’s most notorious production to date. Along with creative team members Alexandra Collier (writer) and Meghan Finn (director), Lauren developed a fundraising and marketing strategy for this ambitious site-specific performance piece, as well as line producing the live show on a nightly basis which ran for 79 performances in winter 2014. The intimate experience with only 3-audience members involves over 50 artists, most of which are performing on the streets of lower Manhattan while a cab cruises along. The project was supported by generous individual donors, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and was extended by popular demand with funding from 3-Legged Dog Art & Technology Center. A spot about the show aired on NY1 News and Lauren was interviewed on National Public Radio’s Marketplace about the process of producing the show, which aired live across the U.S. TAKE ME HOME received its World Premiere at Incubator Arts Project’s Other Forces festival in January 2014 and was featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, American Theatre Magazine, TDF Stages, and NY Theater Now.

Lauren’s background and continued interest in academia led her to explore teaching and consulting. She served as a teaching assistant at NYU Tisch School of Drama for Professor Elizabeth Bradley’s courses “Self-Start: The Fundamentals of Artistic Entrepreneurship” and “Leadership & Management for Theatre in a Global Context”, as well as assisting Professor Bradley with various professional workshops for artists including a summit of twelve of Singapore’s cultural leaders led in NYC in 2014. Lauren has also enjoyed guest lecturing and speaking for courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York University, and Yale University. While working with Calla Videt’s science-focused arts organization Sightline, Lauren traveled to Harvard University with the company to lead a weekend-long workshop with undergraduates with the goal of forging a meaningful dialogue between artists and scientists and then continued on to be one of ten finalists in the Harvard Presidents’ Challenge and pitched for up to $100,000 to create an educational branch of the company. She is a Founding Board Member and currently serves as the Producing Director, and has produced ten projects with Sightline since 2010.

After constant exposure to the film industry while living in Los Angeles and studying at USC, Lauren relocated to New York City and produced a series of independent films, including Moving Forward written and directed by Joshua Weber, Becoming Mim written by Kelley Jackson and directed by Maggie Surovell, and shorts The Days God Slept and The Minions both written by Joseph Fiorillo and directed by Jeremiah Kipp. Lauren also produced the feature length film Leora Kalish’s SUGAR! directed by Shari Berman starring Alice Ripley (Tony Award for Next to Normal) and Robert Clohessy (HBO’s Oz), served as a Co-Producer on the feature Saint Janet written by Kyle Jarrow, directed by Habib Azar and starring Kelly Bishop (Gilmore Girls, Tony Award for Chorus Line) and was an Associate Producer for Executive Producer Joe Dante’s (Gremlins) Dark written by Elias Ganster and directed by Nick Basile. Lauren also directed a mini-movie adaptation of the recently published novel Beautiful Garbage in collaboration with novelist Jill Di Donato. Films that Lauren have produced are Official Selections at festivals all over the U.S. including the Newport Beach Film Festival, VisionFest NYC, Rainer Independent Film Festival, Coney Island Film Festival, HorrorHound Film Festival (Best Director, Jeremiah Kipp), San Diego Black Film Festival, and the Manhattan Film Festival.

Since 2010, Lauren has raised more than $250,000 across 25 online crowd-funding campaigns on various platforms, including Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Rockethub, and more. Lauren Rayner Productions is proud to be a fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas and Lauren is a proud member of the Freelancers Union.