Karin McCracken is a theatre writer and performer based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her work prioritizes a strong audience/performer relationship and plays in forms that are experimental and post-dramatic. Her most recent play, Heartbreak Hotel, explores the physiological impacts of grief. The show enjoyed a successful run at Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2024 and will showcase at arts festivals in Australia, the United Kingdom, and North America in 2025-2026. Heartbreak Hotel has been optioned for a feature film adaptation, which she is currently writing.
McCracken is the co-director of EBKM alongside Eleanor Bishop. They make contemporary theatre for a range of audiences. Their work includes the large-scale show Gravity & Grace, adapted from the novel Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus, and Yes Yes Yes, a show for young people about consent and healthy relationships. Yes Yes Yes has been translated into Welsh and Catalan, with forthcoming translations in 2025, and has toured extensively. The duo were the recipients of the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award in 2022 - the first time in the award's 40-year history that it was awarded to a creative partnership. In 2025, McCracken will perform her work in Canada, the U.S.A., Australia, Europe. and the UK.
At MacDowell, McCracken worked on the first draft of a new theatre show, Ponzi, which explores the SEC's failure to detect Bernie Madoff's longstanding fraud.
