Emma Tadmor
Playwright, Director, Actor
Founder and Artistic Director, RJ Theatre Company

Emma Tadmor is an American playwright, director, and actor whose work examines survival, memory, and the politics of voice, particularly where private experience collides with public narrative. Her plays are known for their psychological intensity and minimal staging, centering the actor–audience relationship and the tension between intimacy and power.

Her debut play Plasters premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2021, where it ran to sold-out audiences and was praised by The List, The Edinburgh Reporter, and The Stage. Her second play, Charlie, premiered at TheaterLab in 2022. In 2023, her 55-minute adaptation Hamlet Split Apart, a reimagining of Hamlet through the lens of dissociative identity disorder, premiered Off-Broadway at The Flea Theater.

Tadmor is the founder and Artistic Director of RJ Theatre Company, established in 2020 to develop intimate, actor-driven new work. She is also the co-founder and curator of Circle Theater Festival, an annual two-month Off-Broadway festival launched in 2024 dedicated to psychologically driven plays that prioritize emotional truth over spectacle.

Most recently, she created Heretic Weekend, a nonprofit multidisciplinary festival devoted to reexamining misunderstood women in history. Its inaugural edition, hosted by Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, centered on Anne Boleyn and featured a staged reading of Tadmor’s play Heretic, a keynote lecture, and new short works by emerging female playwrights.

Across her writing and directing, Tadmor is drawn to figures whose voices have been distorted, suppressed, or misremembered. Her work often explores the fragile boundary between personal narrative and historical record, asking who is allowed to tell a story and who is written out of it.

Selected Works