B.A., Theater Studies and Music (Vocal Performance), Emory University
Biography
Olive Zhang (she/they) is an actor, educator, and theater-maker who creates performances that use humor to explore how identity-based hierarchies are created and enforced in the US, which usually means telling jokes about her parents and growing up in Florida. Olive has great comedic timing, which you can tell because they graduated from CalArts with their Master of Fine Arts in Acting in the middle of a pandemic.
Olive is one-third of You Should Feel Bad, a performance collective specializing in creating politically driven tragicomedies in a style they refer to as "Theater of the Depressed". You Should Feel Bad's first play, How the Grinch Reversed Racism, clashes a reading of Jim Carrey's Grinch as accidental racial allegory against an interpretation of him as an eco-terrorist to examine how conversations about race fall apart when entered in bad faith. It premiered at Atlanta Fringe in 2022 and toured at Asheville Fringe and IndyFringe in 2023. Their second show, Meowderous Intent, fuses murder mystery, Dora the Explorer, and Nature documentaries to critique the human tendency to anthropomorphize animals and had its first run at Asheville Fringe 2024. In 2025, they created Expiration Date, an interactive show about toxic relationships, which toured in Asheville, Indianapolis, and eventually Atlanta. YSFB's fourth piece, Oop, Can't Say That, premiered at Atlanta's Lavender Fest in the summer of 2026. Oop is a show about the censorship of Queer and Trans People of Color in education and media through legislative and regulatory pressures. Olive also created a sketch show about Asian American stereotypes called Witness the Yellow Peril, which ran at Son of Semele in January 2020. How any of these shows start as comedies is a fantastic question.
Outside of making confusing theatre and teaching, Olive also spends time playing great games, reading great books, and eating great food. Feel free to send them recommendations for any of the above!
