Hi.

-Senior Creative Director
-Narrative/Experience Designer
-Creative Strategist
-Speaker & Workshop Facilitator
-Personal Brand/Story Coach

I’m Joanna, a writer, immersive experience designer, and creative strategist focused on lighting up projects that have the power to shift the world through the alchemy of business, art, and personal transformation.

For nearly six years, I was the Senior Story Creative Director for Meow Wolf, leading story development and world building for multiple projects, including the Omega Mart exhibition in Las Vegas, Convergence Station in Denver, and the overall strategy for the company’s story universe. I am currently a narrative and experience design consultant on a range of projects, including with Jon Favreau, Chloe Zhao, Wim Hof, and for Virgin Voyages.

Throughout my career, I’ve has also crafted stories and experiences to inspire change for companies like Nike, Nordstrom, Dell, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and I spent eight years as a writer for the Seattle Times. I’ve given talks and led workshops about collaboration, immersive design, and the future of storytelling for Facebook, Breckenridge Film Festival, Storyworld 3.0, Stanford University, Creative Experience Santa Fe, and the RealTime Conference. She has been a keynote speaker for REMIX Summit, Next Stage Summit, Worlds in Play and the Immersive World Adventure. 

I provide 1:1 coaching to creatives and entrepreneurs looking for support honing a personal brand/story and turning on creative flow.

My own creative work often explores mystery, wildness, and transformation, and my theatrical experiences have been developed nationally and internationally, including at the Finnish National Opera, Banff Playwrights Colony, Tofte Lake Center, Seattle Repertory Theatre, On the Boards, ZACH Theatre, Kitchen Dog Theater, Great Plains Theatre Conference, groundswell playwrights conference, National Winter Playwrights Retreat, Annex Theatre, Live Girls! Theater, 14/48: The World’s Quickest Theater Festival, the NEWvember New Plays Festival, Theatricum Botanicum, with Austin’s acclaimed Rude Mechs, and at the New York and Hollywood fringe festivals.

I was resident playwright at Chance Theater in Southern California, and I have an on-going relationship with the company, developing three new plays with them.

Seattle Repertory Theatre commissioned my newest play, Burn Me Down, a theatrical experience with music (and coyotes), and it will premiere in Los Angeles in 2025. It was a semi-finalist for the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.

My play about BDSM and liberation, Knotted, will premiere in New York this fall.

My political drama about Iran, The Orange Garden, was a winner of the 2016 Keene Prize for Literature and included on the 2016 Kilroys List. My immersive exploration of food and sex, Please Open Your Mouth, premiered at Café Nordo in Seattle.

I’m also a songwriter and musician, and my original country musical, 100 Heartbreaks, was workshopped in Seattle Rep's New Play Program, with the Northwest Playwrights Alliance, and was presented at the country’s largest arts and culture festival, Bumbershoot. It premiered at the Sahara Lounge in Austin where it was nominated for an Austin Critics’ Table Award for Outstanding Musical.

I have an MFA in Playwriting from The University of Texas at Austin and 2+ years of training with the International School of Temple Arts.