ABOUT
Elaina Di Monaco (she/her) is a theatre artist living and working in Philadelphia.
She is a co-founder of ON THE ROCKS, a collaboration with playwright Haygen-Brice Walker, where they create annual late-night-byob queer horror theatre. OTR's mission is to take a challenging look at millennial culture inside of systems of homophobia and white supremacy through a lens of deconstructed horror, humor, and sex. Recent works include Our Ouija Board, WOLFCRUSH: a queer werewolf play, The Bride's a Cunt, & Birdie's Pit Stop (and the tribe of queers who fucked everything up). Named "fringe darlings" by the Broad Street Review, Elaina & Haygen-Brice continue to shock and delight annually as a part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
In addition to this work, Elaina is a freelance director and dramaturg focusing on the development of queer new plays. She workshops with local playwrights and collaborates with her collective actors and designers to explore new realms of storytelling that represent nuanced queer lives on the stage.
Elaina has recently worked with The Wilma Theater, Playwright's Center, Theatre Horizon, Tiny Dynamite, InterAct Theatre, PlayPenn, Act II Playhouse, Theatre With A View, & others.
She has recently begun to explore the ideologies of intimacy work and is seeking additional training to improve her understanding of power structures in the room, radical consent, and to make the sex in her plays even sexier. Elaina is also: decidedly over the patriarchy, uninterested in the gender binary, and disapproves of being interrupted during production meetings. She is working on unlearning.
Elaina currently lives in West Philadelphia with her partner, Emma. They have too many cats.