Amy Oestreicher is a PTSD Specialist, Audie award-nominated playwright, performer, and multidisciplinary creator. Amy overcame a decade of trauma to become a sought-after trauma-informed teaching artist, author, writer for The Huffington Post, international keynote speaker, RAINN representative, and health advocate. She has given three TEDx Talks on transforming trauma through creativity, and her story has appeared on NBC’s Today, CBS, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen Magazine, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and MSNBC, among others. A singer, librettist, and visual mixed media artist, she dedicates her work to celebrating everyday miracles, untold stories, and the detours in life that can spark connection and transform communities. Amy has toured her autobiographical musical, Gutless & Grateful, to over 200 venues from 54 Below to Barrington Stage Company since its 2012 NYC debut, as well as a mental health program for colleges, conferences and organizations. She is currently developing her full-length play, Flicker and a Firestarter, which just had its first AEA Staged Reading, and More Than Ever Now, a play based on her grandmother's story of survival. She most recently premiered her one-woman multimedia musical, Passageways, at HERE Arts Center, for which she created music, book, lyrics, and artwork.
As the 2014 Eastern Regional Recipient of Convatec’s Great Comebacks Award and WEGO Health “Health Activist Hero”, and WeGO Health Expert, medical community, speaking for National WOCN conferences and the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress, and writing for the official print publication of the UOAA. She has devised programming for the Transformative Language Arts Network National Conference, the Eating Recovery Foundation, the 40th Anniversary New England Educational Opportunity Association Milestones Conference, three Annual National Mental Health America Conference, and others. She has been the featured keynote speaker for national conferences including the Pacific Rim Conference of Diversity and Disability, the International School of Social Work Conference, and Women of Resilience.
As a playwright, Amy has received awards and accolades for engaging her audiences in dynamic conversation on trauma’s effects on society, including Women Around Town’s “Women to Celebrate” 2014, BroadwayWorld “Best Theatre Debut,” Bistro Awards “New York Top Pick, and the “Singular Award” at the Sarasolo Theatre Festival, presented annually for a “performance that is exceptionally uncommon, groundbreaking, original and inventive.” Amy has performed excerpts of her solo oral history Play, Divers, as part of Brooklyn's immigrants and Exile, Beechwood Art's Giving Voice, Dixon Place, Seekonk Storytelling Television Special, and Museum of Jewish Heritage Festival of Untold Women. She is a cabaret and theatre reviewer for BroadwayWorld, Her theatre education essays and monologues have been published in Creative Pedagogy journals, as part of a theatre curriculum for high school students in the Philippines. Her play, "We Re-Member" honoring the immigration stories of her grandparents, has been performed in twelve states, amd her full-length Play, Factory Treasure, has been performed at the Philadelphia Arts Center, Identity Theatre, LIU, The Depot, and Actors Theatre of Newburyport. Her short plays have been published by the Eddy Theatre Company and finalists in Manhattan Repertory Theatre’s Short Play Festival, as well as NYC Playwright’s Women in the Age of Trump.
Amy’s collaboration with Beechwood Arts on the immersion salon, “Resilience and the Power of the Human Spirit”, has traveled around the world to health and arts facilities as a public installation, incorporating her monologues, art, writing and recipes to express the life-altering detours and ultimately the invaluable gifts of her resilient journey. Amy is also an active artist and teacher in the Jewish community, being honored by United Way in 2005 for her music programs at Hollander House, completing artist residencies at Art Kibbutz, and delivering “Hope, Resilience & Biblical Women” keynotes for synagogues and religious schools. She is a teaching artist with Brooklyn's Community World Project, and trained ACTSmart, a Playback Theatre troupe in Amherst, MA. She is also a passionate arts education advocate, a successful mixed media visual artist, a continuing education studio arts teacher, and her artwork has been shown in esteemed galleries in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Chicago, San Diego and New York, as well as published in national publications including Conquer, Topology and Cargo Literary. She has recently published her memoir, My Beautiful Detour: An Unthinkable Journey from Gutless to Grateful. See more at www.amyoes.com.
August 5, 2017
An exclusive interview with Artistic Directors Rick Dildine, Christopher Ashley, Blake Robison, Jim Petosa, and Anne Hamburger for their insights on theatre's role in society today.
July 10, 2017
103 seasons and going strong - and not just because of nostalgia. The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene has reimagined 'Amerike - The Golden Land', the 1984 musical by Zalmen Mlotek and Moishe Rosenfeld, appropriately running near Ellis Island. Weaving incredible stories with fantastic songs, multimedia and choreography, the show creates a dynamic portrayal of the Jewish people who immigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much like my own grandparents.
June 27, 2017
Brian Stokes Mitchell is a man of many talents. He's a stage and film veteran with the most glorious baritone voice. The gifted actor took the stage at Feinstein's/54 Below on his own for the first time this month with a concert of songs, mainly from his forthcoming album PLAYING WITH MUSIC.
June 15, 2017
'soot and spit' has already received rave reviews from the New York Times, and Kim Weild, the director behind this ambitious new work, shared her "insider" perspective of the outsider art piece.
June 14, 2017
'Why is this night different from all other nights?' The Jewish Plays Project is known for putting bold, progressive Jewish conversations on world stages. It made this Jewish playwright's dreams come true to do some 'kibbitzing' with the creative team of JPP's newest work.
June 13, 2017
In Melissa Errico's latest show, MELISSA ERRICO SINGS SONDHEIM, at the famed Feinstein's/54 Below, she may have performed some of the composer's must oversung showstoppers, but it felt as though the audience was hearing them for the first time.
June 6, 2017
Completing the Circle: 360Rep Co, Raises Awareness for Gays Against Guns with The Pulse Project Premiere By Amy Oestreicher
June 2, 2017
The Neo-Futurists talk Art, Suspense, Mystery, and their exciting new true-crime documentary, A Simple Art.
May 20, 2017
'There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.' -Gertrude Stein
May 2, 2017
Alice Sommer Herz, the world's oldest living Holocaust survivor and a prolific concert pianist, once said, 'Music saved my life, and Music saves me still.' On Yom Hashoah, a day devoted to honoring the lives lost in the Holocaust, a group of artists visited Pangea to pay tribute to souls saved through music, the strong men and women of the concentration camps, and the resilience of the human spirit.
January 31, 2017
Last year, Manda Leigh Blunt graduated from New York University with a dream many musical theatre writers share: to get their work seen and heard. All it took were inspiring words from another female artist to launch something truly ground breaking, just a few months later. "My friends and I attended a session with Judith Light, which was incredible," Blunt recounted. "A lot of what I was hearing, especially from the other women who attended, echoed what I had felt and had been hearing in the conversations all around me at NYU. Once you graduate, there seemed to be so few opportunities as a musical theatre writer still in the development process. You can have these big 29-hour readings or productions---if you get that---but there are fewer in-between moments where you can get yourself heard in a supportive environment, where a women-identified writer can say, 'This is where we are in this draft, and we're using this opportunity to move forward.'" So Blunt decided to do something about it. By that August, she founded Artemis Theatricals, a non-profit company with the mission to empower women storytellers in musical theatre through curated cabarets and additional styles of performance.
September 14, 2016
In her tour de force, one-woman show REASONS TO BE UNSUCCESSFUL at the Metropolitan Room on September 2, comedian Theresa Kloos used her endearingly quirky sense of humor to bring the audience closer than we ever could have hoped for, in a night of comic showtunes, sassy pop songs, and spunky rock beats. UNSUCCESSFUL debuted in June as a follow-up to her first show, REASONS TO BE UNPRETTY, which was her first 'exploration of the trials and tribulations of a funny, albeit awkward girl growing up in Cleveland.' This time around, Kloos is back with lessons learned and a powerful message to share--- infused with her humor, of course.
September 6, 2016
Summertime brings to mind nighttime fireflies, lemonade that makes your lips pucker, rocking chairs creaking on the front porch, and, like the famous Porgy and Bess tune of the same name, melodies that trickle into the night. Summertime Swing is the latest masterpiece and collaboration at its finest by the legendary Michael Feinstein and Marilyn Maye, evoking a sultry, steamy love letter to the fleeting season and a prime example of craft, art, and passion. The moment I walked into the dining room at Feinstein's/54 Below, where Summertime Swing played through September 1 a fashionably dressed gentleman greeted me with, 'It's a fantastic show.' The packed house was already alive with thrilling enthusiasm as they eagerly waited for the show to start. When you attend a show headlined by a golden age cabaret great and a prolific 'music revivalist' who happens to have the venue named for him, you come expecting to be no less than entertained. Summertime Swing elevated the art of summer entertainment tenfold--- a tribute to anything we could hope for in the last days of summer.
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