About me

Maria Vorhis is a writer, performer, and once upon a time clown.* Her solo show, Are You There, George? was awarded #1 Newbie of Minnesota Fringe by vita.mn culture magazine in 2014 and she spent two years touring across the country as a solo performer with Iowa Poet Laureate Mary Swander’s play, Map of My Kingdom. Her film credits include web series, Sad Dad, feature film, These Hopeless Savages, for which she was awarded Best Supporting Actress by The Wild Rose Independent Film Festival, and short film Sexpert Franzen, nominated for Best Short of the Twin Cities Film Fest (2018). As a storyteller she has performed in bars, theaters, and living rooms, and was featured at the Iowa City Witching Hour Festival in 2016 as well as Mortified at Lincoln Halll. Maria’s teaching experience includes leading storytelling workshops for new and seasoned storytellers, teaching drama to adults with developmental disabilities, and working as a certified TimeSlips facilitator, co-creating original stories through the use of photographs, poetry, music, and movement with seniors with memory loss. Her writing has been published in Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, Salt Hill Journal, and Pigeon Pages, and her essay, “Artist” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2021.  She lives in a 130-year-old house with her husband and two cats in St. Paul, MN.

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*Fun fact: she is the only person she knows to have been accepted to clown school three times, only to learn—all three times—that the clown school was closing.