Amanda Shank is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles, California. With an experimental practice rooted in the interplay between text, image and performance, her work frequently explores themes of women’s identity and sexuality while also dismantling traditional notions of form, genre, chronology and performativity.

Amanda has developed projects with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National New Play Network, the Henson Foundation, Circle X Theatre, The Industry, the Prototype Festival, CalArts Center for New Performance, Los Angeles Performance Practice's LAX Festival and many more. She has presented work at venues such as the Ace Hotel DTLA, the Hammer Museum, Z Below and Automata Arts. As a playwright, her work has been published in the U.S. and translated internationally.

Selected scripts or bodies of work have been a recipient of the National New Play Network's Collaboration Fund (2016-17), finalist for the Sundance Theatre Lab in MENA (2016), the P73 Playwriting Fellowship (2015), a semi-finalist for the O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference (2015), and have twice received an honorable mention for The Kilroys' THE LIST (2014, 2015).

Amanda did her undergraduate study at Emerson College in Writing, Literature & Publishing and her MFA in Writing for Performance at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). She is currently Associate Dean for the School of Theater at CalArts and an Associate Artistic Director for CalArts Center for New Performance.