Francesca Montanile Lyons is a multidisciplinary artist living in Philadelphia. Her work seeks to disempower shame through radical honesty and voyeuristic delight. Francesca is Co-Artistic Director of Antigravity Performance Project, a tristate devising company that makes original performance with non-theatrical texts. She conceived of, wrote, and directed Dear Diary LOL- a play made with the words of real-life diaries of teenage girls in the late 90s/early 2000s. Dear Diary LOL premiered in the 2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, followed by a run at FringeArts and two runs at the New Ohio in NYC in 2018 to rave reviews (“…we absolutely need more theater like this.” - Exuent NYC 2019). Her work has found a home in bar art spaces, where she performs as The Sprite (a buffon-inspired pixie character with a balloon for a penis) and with Girl Poop, a “delightfully weird” femme foursome specializing in Pussy Pop Rock: short, high-octane ditties inspired by first-person experience set to simple and catchy beats. Other credits include directing Legal Tender by poet Kyle Dacuyan (Antigravity at AntFest 2019 and FringeArts 2020), All 100 Fires by Donna Oblongata (2019 National Tour), Fourth Quarter (First Person Arts Festival 2018), and Rough & Tumble (2018), as well as performing/co-creating The Hopefuls (a satirical punk-clown band, 2016), Slaughter/ette (2015), and Nellie/Nellie (2014). MFA in Devised Performance from UArts/Pig Iron School (2016). BA in Theatre Arts & Performance Studies from Brown U (2011). @fmldrawsbutts

Francesca is also a teaching artist & educator, ranging from dramatic story times for infants and their caregivers to adjunct teaching at Temple University, with plenty in between: visiting elementary school classrooms for the Arden Theater, bilingual arts and literacy classes with the Barnes Foundation & Puentes a las Artes, and relationship/emotional skill-building workshops with Girls Leadership.