Adrienne Mackey (she/her/hers)

Adrienne Mackey is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the potential of performance and play. With her company, Swim Pony, she’s led the creation of works including SURVIVE!, a 22,000 square ft choose-your-own-adventure installation examining humanity’s place within the infinite cosmos; LADY M, a feminist reimagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; THE GIANT SQUID, a “crypto-zoology-horror-comedy” performed in actual science lecture halls across Philadelphia; and THE BALLAD OF JOE HILL, a play with music created for historic Eastern State Penitentiary and exploring the wrongful execution of the famed IWW labor icon. She’s also the originator of CROSS POLLINATION, a residency program in which 32 artists took part in documented interdisciplinary creative experiments. Most recently she’s focused on works fusing games and theater in projects like TRAILOFF – a mobile app performance created with the PA Environmental Council using GPS to embed original BIPOC-authored stories onto nature trails; THE END – a month-long mixed reality game played via text message to explore player fears about mortality; AQUA MAROONED!, a wildlife card game commissioned by the Alliance for Watershed Education that released 15,000 copies across three states; and WAR OF THE WORLDS, a game/theater hybrid with Drexel's Entrepreneurial Game Studio looking at gentrification as an invasive force. In 2024 she premiered her latest work, THE STUPIDEST, SCARIEST TIME, a participatory satire exploring American obsession with work, staged as an interactive productivity bootcamp.

Mackey has been the recipient of two Knight Arts Challenges, an Independence Foundation Fellowship, FringeArts LAB Fellowship, CEC New Edge Residency and was named a 2023 “Best of Philadelphia” by Philly Magazine. She’s been awarded grants from the NEA, Barra, Knight, William Penn Foundation and numerous other funders, has been a finalist for the USA Artist Fellowship, the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge and the 2023 Games4Change Best Game Award. She’s also a classically trained soprano and sings funk music (featured on America’s Got Talent) and former chemist. www.swimpony.org