Olivia Rose Barresi is an actor and multidisciplinary artist based in NYC who uses her body and voice to playfully approach the unanswerable questions of how to be, what to have faith in, and why. An empathic skeptic, her work seeks to understand the motivations behind humanity’s need to believe in the extraordinary.
Olivia most recently made her off-Broadway debut as the female lead in the world premiere of Else Went’s Initiative at the Public Theater, directed by Emma Rosa Went - a story that she helped to develop with the writer and director over nine years. Other favorite recent credits include Mirror Ripple Knock Move On, a short play in Atlantic Theater Company’s MixFest directed by Jacob Basri, Risa Puno and Ran Xia’s interactive theatrical experience Unresolved Rage Game for Soho Rep, and The Cause at WP Theater as directed by Dina Vovsi. Olivia is a member of the Mercury Store’s acting company. She was also a 2023-24 Video Art Resident at BRIC for her project Dogman I, a multimedia piece about a cryptid that explores the technical and emotional challenges of imbuing authenticity into the extraordinary.
As a VO artist, she has lent her voice to a wide array of dramatically-geared projects - from providing ADR for Netflix reality shows to voicing a character in the Triple A video game Vampire: The Masquerade - Swansong for Big Bad Wolf Studios. She appeared in Playing on Air’s 73, SK, an audio drama by Else Went featuring Chukwudi Iwuji that’s premiered as a part of the company’s 2025-26 season. She was honored to be a part of the VO cast for Joyce Carol Oates’ Zero-Sum for Penguin Random House Audio, and to narrate the entirety of Cathy Otten’s With Ash on Their Faces for alternative publisher OR Books. Other collaborators include renowned feminist playwright Carolyn Gage and counterclaim on her Female Nude Seated, artist and playwright Harmon dot Aut, industry veterans Sally Struthers, Kim Coles, and Joyce Reehling in the Judson Theatre Company production of Love, Loss, and What I Wore, and Dreamapp.io on their most recent TikTok voice.
She earned her BFA in Theatre Arts at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, concentrating in acting and dramaturgy, and her MA in Acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).
