Heather Ondersma is a freelance director who loves artistic collaboration, community-building, and the transformational potential of theater. New plays and exploring classics by women are her passion. Heather spent her early career living/studying/working in Prague (including at Vaclav Havel’s home theater), London, Japan and California.  After receiving her M.A. in dramatic art from UC Santa Barbara, Heather moved to New York, where she co-founded and was co-artistic director of Flying Fig Theater, a company devoted to telling women’s stories. Heather directed and co-produced many site-specific and new plays including Sus Manos, then-college student Lauren Gunderson’s first full-length NYC production. Heather is a member of Lincoln Center Director’s Lab and New Georges’ women’s director group The Roaring Girls. She was recently based in Vancouver, BC and was the first artistic director of Children’s Theatre of Richmond. She has done intimacy training with NSIP (Canada), Theatrical Intimacy Education and with IDC. Heather moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2019. Her silver lining of the pandemic is the opportunity to work virtually with fellow artists across the world and to expand her creativity by making theatre in a new way.

Heather was a project lead for Calling Up Justice’s Producing in Pandemic, a weekly space to share techniques for transmedia storytelling.  She is co artistic director of Access Classics with Michaela Goldhaber and co-produced Electra with WTF21.