Heather Gold

Geek comedian. Relentlessly honest. Created interactive performance by mashing up theatre, stand-up and the Net.

Known best among her influential geek following, she has also appeared in: npr, boingboing.net, TechTV, Air America, WIRED, Yahoo Financevision,The Toronto Globe and Mail, The San Jose Mercury News, WHERE Magazine, shift TV, CBC Radio, Fortune.com, thestreet.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Curve, Backstage Pass, the Austin Chronicle and CBC Radio.

Sample third-party triangulation of awesomeness: “I Look Like An Egg, but I Identify As A Cookie” an interactive baking comedy: Oakland Tribune “Best of the Bay,” Curve Magazine: National Lesbian Theatre Award, year-long SF run, Ars Nova (NY), SXSW (Austin). Over 23,000 cookies served.

Sample venues: ArsNova (NY), UCLA, Syracuse University, SxSWi, Ladyfest, Gotham NY, The Marsh (SF), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Maryville College (TN), GirlBar (LA), Red Devil Lounge, Purple Onion, The Earl (Atlanta), JCCSF Elinor Friend Center for the Arts, Kansas University, Great American Music Hall, Bowery Poetry Club, The Vortex (Austin).

Press kudos: “brilliant” and “one of our favorite comedians” (boingboing.net), featured on npr’s Technation, nominated “America’s funniest lesbian” by Curve.

Other honors: AirSpace Residency at Jon Sims, Theatre Bay Area Grant, Zellerbach Foundations Grant, invited to discuss comic innovations at Playwright’s Horizon conference.

As a Public Speaker has performed and addressed many conferences and companies including: Google, DUX 2005, Popkomm, Canada Music Week, SxSWinteractive, Overlap 08.

Net cred: part of first webcasting team (Apple) + iPod/iTunes precursor (Fuse)

Shared the stage with: Macarthur Genius winner’s Biil Irwin and Majora Carter, Broadway solo performer Lisa Kron, Tribe 8’s Lynnee Breedlove, Larry Lessig, Judy Gold, Will Durst, Betsy Salkind, Patton Oswalt and Margaret Cho.

Live/online interactive talk show: The Heather Gold Show (tHGS) hosts conversations we’re craving. Everyone participates with help from a mashup of amazing guests from the geekerati and beyond. Everyone is their own expert. Whenever possible, there’s cake.

Past guests include Creative Common founder Lawrence Lessig, novelist Michelle Tea, Darfur survivor Elijah Riek, and twitter founder Ev Williams.

For example, the first tHGS mashed up flickr co-founder Caterina Fake about how one becomes self-made with other self-made people she’d otherwise never meet: brilliant, octogenarian psychologist Dr. Lillian Rubin and Dave Chappelle opener W. Kamau Bell.

Book Heather for your venue or college.

narrative-style

Driven to comedy by law school, Heather Gold continues to mix mind with matter, never doing the same set or show twice. Heather’s unique style is a reflection of her unorthodox artistic path, reflecting her studies at Yale, Northwestern Law, Groundlings, improv legend Cynthis Szigeti (who’s been a big influence on other students like Conan O’Brien and Lisa Kudrow) years in the geek and entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley.

Heather has the unique ability to make connections between the most unlikely things, and create an immediate intimacy with any audience. Her monologues and riffing stand-up performances fuse personal stories, social observation and conversation. She counts Paul Mooney, Uncabaret, Alice Waters and the Internet among her influences. While performing for her geek audience at SXSW one year, Heather discovered the audience was funny too and began experimenting with open sourcing elements of her shows.

“People are interested in each other. Performance has always been a way of having a unifying collective experience. Today, live performance has an opportunity to do what Congress, towns, big media and perhaps our courts are failing to do: Be a public space in which we can be our whole selves together. This is theatre as commons.” More of Heather’s thoughts on interactive performance.

Heather’s hosted Austin Gay Pride, written for actor Alan Cumming, opened for Margaret Cho and starred in her debut solo show—”I Look Like An Egg, but I Identify As A Cookie“—in which she bakes chocolate chip cookies with the audience. Cookie ran for over a year in San Francisco and was named Best of the Bay by The Oakland Tribune and recognized by Curve magazine in 2004 with their National Theatre Award. Heather won this award in 2005 for The C Word, co-written and performed with Jen Kober. In 2006, Cookie played at invitation at Ars Nova, one of Off-Broadway’s hottest new theatres, which has worked with comic talents like Sarah Silverman, Sandra Bernhard and Julia Sweeney.

Heather emcees and performs for venues and clients across North America, and contributes to magazines and newspapers like The San Jose Mercury News,the Toronto Globe & Mail and CBC Radio. She is currently at work on her second show The Law Project, which has won grants from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and Theatre Bay Area, and her surprisingly-named talk show The Heather Gold Show which has been compared to This American Life in real-time and happens live and online. Having succumbed to success and love, she now performs and lives in both San Francisco and New York, where she is part of the New George’s Hourglass SoloLab.

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Public speaking and hosting

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