Cassandra is a playwright, director and performer, as well as the Artistic Director of Red Scare Theatre Company. Her previous writing for theatre includes The Bone Thief (2018), Under (2017), M’Lady: A Meninist Musical (2017), Long Ago, Long Ago (2015) and Right Dishonourable (2013) among others. Her work has been nominated for Wellington Theatre Awards, commended in the PANZ Long Play competition and shortlisted for ATC’s The Next Stage; she is a previous winner of Playmarket’s Playwrights B4 25. She has also written short plays for School Journal and has been a staff writer for children’s television. Most recently, she wrote the five part audio drama Apocalypse Songs, which was nominated for multiple Audio Verse Awards, and wrote and performed That’s All She Wrote, a musical theatre revue featuring the work of female and non-binary musical theatre composers. Cassandra is based in Wellington.
Cassandra was the winner of the 2019 (for 2020) NZSA/Auckland Museum Research Grant and is working towards the first draft of a new chamber musical exploring the imagined lives of the first nine Chinese women in New Zealand. This piece will be created in collaboration with the award winning contemporary art music composer Salina Fisher, and seeks to explore the experiences of the nine Chinese women and girls recorded in the 1881 New Zealand census. Being awarded this grant also allows Cassandra to have four weeks at The Michael King Writers Centre to work on her project.