Jo Randerson


Joanna Ruth Randerson is a New Zealand writer, director and performer. They are the founder and artistic director of Barbarian Productions, a Wellington-based theatre production company.

Biography

Randerson was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1973 and moved to Wellington when they were four years old. They studied at Wellington Girls' College, and then went on to Victoria University of Wellington to major in English, theatre and film. They wrote, directed and performed in theatre productions for the Victoria University of Wellington Student Drama Club. At the same time they also wrote for and performed at BATS Theatre Wellington, and made television appearances as a stand-up comedian. After graduating, they co-founded the theatre group Trouble in 1995. In 2012 Randerson finished their Master of Theatre Arts in directing from Toi Whakaari New Zealand Drama School and Victoria University of Wellington as well as participating in the Leadership New Zealand programme. Randerson was a recipient of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award in 2008.
Randerson's writing has been twice shortlisted for the IIML Prize, they have won Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards and were nominated for the Billy T Award in 2005. They have earned fellowships at home and abroad – they received the Robert Burns Fellowship in 2001, Winston Churchill Fellow 2003 and completed a CNZ/DOC Wild Creations Residency in 2002 at Cape Kidnappers'. Randerson won the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award in 1997 for their first play Fold. They won the Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award for Literature in 2008. Randerson's books The Keys To Hell, The ''Spit Children, Tales From the Netherworld and The Knot have all been critically acclaimed. Their work is characterized as dark social satire. In a review for The Keys to Hell in Landfall 209'', Anna Smith wrote
Randerson's world is a "holding tank" inside which we shriek, or remain terrified and mute witnesses to the despair that is life – a theme rehearsed over and over. Provocation, not subtlety, is the writer's special effect.

In the 2021 New Year Honours, Randerson was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to the performing arts.

Publications

  • 1998 The Knot
  • 1999 "The Penguin People" in The Picnic Virgin, ed. Emily Perkins
  • 2000 The Spit Children
  • 2003 "Banging Cymbal, Clanging Gong" in Red Light Means Stop
  • 2004 The Keys to Hell
  • 2004 Fold, published with "shudder" by Pip Hall
  • 2006 "The Sheep, the Shepherd" in The Best New Zealand Fiction, Volume Three
  • 2006 "Everything we Know" in Are Angels OK?: The Parallel Universes of New Zealand Writers and Scientists, ed. Paul Callaghan and Bill Manhire
  • 2009 Through the Door, Wedge Press
  • 2010 The Unforgiven Harvest/ The Lead Wait
  • 2012 Tales From the Netherworld''