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 is currently a 2023-24 Video Art Resident at BRIC for her project Dogman, a multimedia piece about a cryptid that explores the technical and emotional challenges of imbuing authenticity into the extraordinary. Favorite recent acting credits include the extensive development of Initiative at the Public Theater with frequent collaborators Else Went and Emma Rosa Went, 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 also a member of the Mercury Store’s acting company.
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 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, 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). She is both a U.S. and E.U. citizen, her paternal grandparents hailing from Sicily.
