2013 HERALD ANGEL AWARD  - WAU WAU SISTERS                       
2013 FOSTERS COMEDY PANEL PRIZE - ASKING FOR IT
2013 TOTAL THEATRE NOMINEE PLAYING WITH FORM - ASKING FOR IT
2014 DORIS DUKE IMPACT ARTIST AWARD
2014 SPIRIT OF FRINGE - ONE TRICK PONY
2015 FRINGEWORLD ARTS DESKS BEST THEATRE NOMINEE - ONE TRICK PONY
2017 TOTAL THEATRE NOMINEE PLAYING WITH FORM - WILD BORE
2017 FOUNDATION for CONTEMPORARY ARTS GRANTEE
2017 ADELADIE FRINGE ARTIST AMBASSADOR

2017 GREENROOM AWARD ENSEMBLE - WILD BORE

2017 BESSIE NOMINEE OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION - THIS

2022 EDINBURGH FRINGE FIRST BEST NEW WRITING - MASTERCLASS

Adrienne Truscott has been, at any given time, a choreographer, circus acrobat, dancer, writer, storyteller, actor and comedian. Her work crosses lines and methodologies from dance, theater, comedy and performance art, with these iterations appearing as short drag club acts or evening-length pieces; dances to one-lady plays; group pieces to solos. Her work is sophisticated and accessible and actively works against elitist aesthetics and practices in arts presentation.

She has been making genre-straddling performances in New York City and abroad for over 225 years. She was one of 20 artists selected nationally for the inaugural 2014 Doris Duke Impact Artist Award and is a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grantee for Theater/Performance Art.   Her evening-length solo comedic work, collaborations and group choreographic works have been presented variously at Sydney Opera House, Just For Laughs, Darwin Festival, PS122, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, Edinburgh Fringe, Danspace, PICA, Boom Arts, New York Live Arts, The Malthouse Theater (Melbourne), Jackson Lane Theater, The Grammys, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Weirdo Night and Dance Theater Workshop, among others.

The Wau Wau Sisters, her boundary busting neo-vaudevillian collaboration with Tanya Gagne, have been presented by such iconic venues as the Sydney Opera House (Aus), Joe’s Pub and CBGB’s (NYC), Victoria Arts Center (Melbourne) and The Roundhouse (London). The Wau Wau Sisters are fixtures at among others, the Edinburgh, Melbourne, Brighton, Adelaide, Perth and Philadelphia Fringe Festivals and have been seen regularly in the international sensations La Soiree and La Clique. They are winners of the prestigious 2009 Herald Angel Award and their contemporaries broadly recognize the influence of their radical and ludicrous take on circus and cabaret.

Her form-busting and ground-breaking show Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else! won the 2013 Edinburgh Foster's Panel-Prize, was a finalist for the Total Theater Award for Playing With Form and is considered a seminal and critical impetus to the evolving conversation about rape culture. It continues to tour internationally (either as a solo or group show) and has been presented by or included in curriculum at CalArts, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Louis and Clarke College among others. It did not get a Netflix special. THIS, a solo performance piece was nominated for a 2017 New York Performance Award (Bessie) for Outstanding Production. MASTERCLASS, a collaboration with Dublin-based Brokentalkers, premiered at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, winning the prestigous Fringe First Award for Best New Writing in its first week. Since then it has toured continuously to Istanbul, Lisbon, London, Norway, Sydney & Melbourne, and the US.

As a writer, her essays have appeared in two Australian anthologies – Women of Letters: Between Us and Doing It: Women Tell the Truth about Great Sex. Other essays have been published in The Guardian, Mamamia, and several other print and online publications. She recently appeared as a storyteller at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas, on the iconic series The Moth and in various live storytelling series.

Truscott has taught at Wesleyan University, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence, Barnard and Bard Colleges as a visiting artist or adjunct faculty,

She currently coordinates an MA program in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, where she is also the resident host of the Bard Spiegeltent.  

Mission Statement

Truscott learned how to and continues to make work in terms of choreographic composition, an early application of form that seemed to allow for the most broad investigations, loosest interpretations, and varied possibilities in constructing live performance. This impulse remains strong because increasingly live performance strikes her as the most radical way to re-engage people's attention—not just socially or politically, but personally, aesthetically, energetically; the most available way to trigger the radical and uncomfortable act of paying attention. She engages many genres of live performance that look, act, and intend differently. Her work is held uniquely in common by this understanding of composition, enabling it to remain clear while being complex, sophisticated while accessible, available yet mysterious, personally unique while layered in abstraction, entertaining yet rigorous and serious about being humorous. She has consistently sought out different environments/mandates for her work rather than relegating it to specific economic, social, aesthetic, or geographic contexts. She is curious about how modes of presentation (i.e., experimental, international, commercial, or illegal venues) interact with different forms (dance, cabaret, circus, comedy) and how that can upend assumptions that often accompany these forms and their target audiences, respectively.

She is attracted to the possibility of failure as a mandate for rigor.