Nikki Kendra Davis has been a Columbus-based arts administrator and theatre artist since 2016. She has worked as an actor, dancer, director, dramaturg, and playwright with various theatre companies including Shadowbox Live, Actors’ Theatre of Columbus, and Short North Stage. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from the University of Richmond and a Master of Arts in Performance Studies from New York University Tisch School of the Arts.  

Nikki’s play “Marie Regina: the Life of Mary Stuart Queen of Scots” had its world premiere at the Abbey Theater of Dublin, Ohio in 2020. Her play “Women Who Know: A Witch Play” about the Pendle Witches and legacy of the European Witch Hunts will premiere in the Fall 2023. To develop new works, Nikki experiments with embodied research epistemologies to create with/become with hauntings and other ghostly matters as a foil to traditional historical research methods. She uses theatre as an educational and activist tool for grappling with the still lingering erasures, exclusions, marginalizations, and manipulations of the historical record – the ghosts which uphold our reality demanding we take notice and action towards reckoning with them. Nikki calls her practice Theatre of the Ghostly Feminine. She teaches workshops of her practice to theatre artists and ensembles around Columbus.  

When not communing with ghosts, Nikki is a cat mom who does lots of hot yoga, considers Scotland her spiritual home, watches lots of TV period dramas, and loves supporting fellow artists and live-long learners!