Lauren Rayner Productions | Lauren Rayner produces, manages, and directs for stage, film and multi-media. Visit for more!
Lauren Rayner is a storyteller and experiments by telling stories in various creative mediums, including but not limited to projects for Stage, Film, Music, Dance, Opera, Photography, Web Design, and more. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Applied Theatre Arts in Education from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. While at USC she re-developed the Women's Theatre Organization and served as President for over three years. Lauren thrives in new play development and directed four of her own pieces in Los Angeles and has cultivated the development and produced over twenty five new works by fellow female artists since 2006. In 2007, her play Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously received a roundtable reading at the Lark Play Development Center in New York. For two years, Lauren was a leading troupe member of MRS Degree Improv, USC's only all female improv troupe.
Lauren has a solid foundation in classical texts. In 2004, she was selected for the Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship. She produced and directed adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream (2004) and Macbeth (2005) and took both productions to the Mary Folger Shakespeare Festival in Washington, D.C. receiving the Brian Cabe Award for Excellence in Directing for two consecutive years. In December 2007, Lauren directed and produced an all female production of King Lear. In 2008, Lauren studied abroad in London at the British American Drama Academy with a focus on Classical and Restoration texts and stage combat.
In July 2009, she had her NYC directorial debut with Roots & Wings Theatrical in their annual Duct Tape & A Dream new works festival and has since directed five shows for the company. In August 2009, Lauren was invited onto the Board of Directors and currently serves as Marketing Director. In November 2009, Lauren produced ACTIVATE! the launch event for Theatre C and has held various positions within the company for the past three years {Producing Associate, General Manger} and currently serves as Executive Producer with Artistic Director Carlos Armesto. Theatre C produced Jesse Zaritt’s BINDING in the soloNOVA Arts Festival in May 2010, winning 3 NY Innovative Theatre Awards {Best Choreography, Best Solo-Performer, Best Performance Art Production} and was extended by PS 122 and the terraNOVA Collective. She was on the producing team for Kyoung H. Park's disOriented at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre in February 2011, nominated for Best Choreography at the NY Theatre Innovative Theatre Awards. In October 2010, Lauren ventured into booking commercial theatre as an Associate Producer with VoiceChair Productions led by Executive Producer Erich Jungwirth. In Winter 2011, Lauren re-joined the staff at the Lark Play Development Center in the General Management department and managed their new studio spaces on 43rd Street. She also returned to the two-time Obie Award winning The Play Company as the Marketing & Outreach Associate striving to elevate the company’s organizational profile until she left to fully pursue her freelancing career in July 2012.
Since becoming a full-time freelance producer, Lauren lived in Scotland for a month to produce for Brain Melt Consortium’s production of Daughters of Lot presented in the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, receiving a 4-Star review in The Scotsman. She line produced the Grand Opening of the new home of Lark Play Development Center which included multiple readings of plays written specifically for the event by such luminaries as David Henry Hwang, Arthur Kopit, Theresa Rebeck, Rajiv Joseph, Tina Howe (among others) and coordinated filming with a moving multiple-camera set up for live streaming the evening around the world via VirtualArtsTV. Lauren was then invited onto the VirtualArtsTV team as the VP of Artistic Production and line produced their first ever live-streamed performing arts festival, the WiredArts Fest at the Secret Theatre, which streamed live to over 50,000 viewers. She loves re-imagining classic texts and produced Ionesco’s The Future Is in Eggs and Pirandello’s Sicilian Limes, which integrated mobile audio streaming technology at The Shell Theatre in Times Square in Summer of 2011 and then in Fall 2012 produced a sold-out run of Sartre’s Huis Clos (“No Exit”) in French with English supertitles at the 45th Street Theatre.
Lauren’s continued interest and background in education have led her to explore teaching and consulting. She has been a teaching assistant at NYU Tisch School of Drama for Professor Elizabeth Bradley’s courses “Self-Start: The Fundamentals of Artistic Entrepreneurship” and “Global Management in the Arts” and has guest lectured at the Fashion Institute of Technology. While serving as Producing Director of Calla Videt’s science-focused arts organization Sightline, Lauren traveled to Harvard University with the company to lead a weekend-long workshop with undergraduates with the goal of forging a meaningful dialogue between artists and scientists and then continued on to be 1 of 10 finalists in the Presidents’ Challenge and pitched for up to $100,000 in funding to create an educational branch of the company.
After constant exposure to the film industry while in Los Angeles and at USC, Lauren relocated to New York and produced a series of independent short films, including Moving Forward written and directed by Joshua Weber and The Days God Slept written by Joseph Fiorillo and directed by Jeremiah Kipp. Lauren is in process of producing three feature length films {Lauren Fox’s Atlas of the Soul, Jason Levy’s Due Back: This Lifetime, and Leora Kalish’s SUGAR!} and adapting Colette La Pointe’s play The Wedding Thieves as a feature length screenplay that Lauren is set to direct. Lauren also directed a mini-movie adaption of the recently published novel Beautiful Garbage in an ongoing collaboration with writer Jill Di Donato. Films that Lauren have produced are Official Selections at festivals all over the U.S. including the Newport Beach Film Festival, Manhattan Film Festival, and the San Diego Black Film Festival.
Currently, Lauren lives in New York City and produces a mixture of eight to twelve stage, film, and multi-media projects a year. She also offers production, fundraising, and marketing consultations on a per-project basis. Lauren Rayner Productions is proud to be a fiscally sponsored project of Fractured Atlas and Lauren is a proud member of the Freelancers Union.
As the Artistic/Producing Associate, Kelly O’Brien is just as thrilled to be contributing to the LRP narrative as she is to be working with Lauren herself. A senior at Fordham University and a member of the Rose Hill Honors Program, Kelly is an American Studies major concentrating in Cultural Products. During her time at Fordham, Kelly has worked with all three on-campus theatre groups in various capacities including acting, directing, and stage-managing. She also currently serves on the executive board of the Theatrical Outreach Program as secretary. Prior to college, she spent three years working in film and television as a Media Productions Intern at OSC-21, an educational-access channel in her hometown of Niagara Falls, NY. In the summer of 2010, Kelly was awarded the St. Edmund Campion Summer Fellowship, which funded her time spent as the Senior Museum Intern at the Smithsonian-affiliated Museum of American Finance. In addition to LRP, she will be interning with the Deconstructive Theatre Project in the fall. Kelly currently lives in the Bronx and works for the radio station WFUV, an NPR affiliate that broadcasts to the greater New York metro area. At the end of her internship in Summer 2011, Kelly produced a project of her choice under the guise of Lauren Rayner Productions. She wrote and directed a staged-reading of her original one-act play "Riley Collins Needs to Stop Dating Actors" with a post-reading conversation.
Sabrina Paterson is a Brooklyn based writer of short stories, poetry, screenplays and stage plays. After receiving her B.S. from SUNY at Stony Brook, she decided to return to her first true love, the arts and picked her pen once again and began to pen the stories of people roaming around in her head. Sabrina recently completed a run of her world premiere play Limitations at Manhattan Repertory Theater as well as Conversation with Death which was performed at the famed Magic Theater at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco as a part of their theater festival and also Monster which debuted in the 2011 Planet Connections Festivity in support of the RAINN organization. Sabrina is both excited and honored to be joing this team of amazing women in her role as Producing Associate with LRP and is looking forward to helping realize the vision of this company and the artists LRP works with.
Kelsey Balzli is originally from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her love for theatre stemmed from performing in high school productions and has brought her here to NYC to pursue marketing for the theatrical arts. She currently works as a marketing intern for Sleep No More NYC. Summer 2011, she worked as a marketing intern for The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey (Madison, NJ) and during summer 2012 interned at The Play Company as well as Sleep No More NYC in the respective marketing departments. She will graduate from the University of Alabama in May 2013 with a major in Public Relations and a minor in Political Science. For more information, visit kelseybalzli.com.
LRP { Collaborateurs }
LRP projects always have a collaborative element to the team and/or the development of the work across various mediums and disciplines. The following are immensely talented artists and companies with whom LRP collaborates with to tell stories:
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