Nia Bowers
Three passports. Four childhood countries. One small theater on West 36th Street, where she’s about to spend an evening telling you, very specifically, about her dad.
By the time Jacqui Byrne landed in New York the geography of her life already read like an airline manifest. Montreal. London. Bermuda. Switzerland. New Hampshire. A year, somewhere in the middle of all that, just traveling. Pick a continent and there’s a chance she has a connection there, a couch she could probably sleep on, a story she’ll tell you halfway through dinner.
She picked up a Bachelor of Arts in Theater from Dartmouth College and then headed over to Columbia for a Master of Fine Arts in Acting. The kind of resume that sounds plotted out but probably wasn’t. Citizen of Canada, Ireland and Saint Kitts. That last one tends to surprise people.
Byrne is currently doing roughly nine things at once, which is the going rate for a working actor in New York. There’s a play in workshop called Here, Time Feels So… by Andrew Reid, recently published by 1319 Press, where she’s listed as the original cast. There’s the musical adaptation of The Oresteia she’s building with composer Nate Weida at Judson Memorial Church. Theres a solo show at The Studio at the Tank in May — a piece she has been writing for ten years, about grieving her father. She teaches theater at an elementary school in Brooklyn. She hosts trivia. She takes improv at UCB. She auditions.
And her resume doesn’t end there. She event worked two plays at one time in 2024. D.A. Mindell’s Somebody Told Me There is a Monster in the Lake with First Kiss Theatre Company and a new version of the Threepenny Opera directed by Benjamin Viertel and written by Nate Weida. Her passion for workshopping new plays and creating roles sets her apart from most.
In August 2024 she performed in Do You Party? by Megan Rivkin at the Vineyard Theater for the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, where the play got picked for the Top 30. The same year she did The Great Ignored by Finnegan Kruckemeyer at the Provincetown Playhouse for New Plays for Young Audiences. Before that, The Last Five Star Bowl America in America by Andrew Reid at the Chain Theatre One-Act Festival in 2023, directed by Benjamin Viertel. Going further back: the US premiere of Joy Wilkinson’s The Sweet Science of Bruising in 2020 at the Hopkins Center, where she played Matilda Blackwell. She also played Violet in It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at Northern Stage that same year.
So. A teacher. A singer. A writer. An actor who actually trained.
On her own site she describes herself as drawn to art that is, and these are her words, “funny, emphatic and a little off kilter.” You can feel that in how she puts a season together. There’s less of a plan and more of an ear — for what makes a room laugh, for what makes it sit still.
You grew up in five different places. What does that do to a young actor?
It rearranges your idea of normal pretty fast. London, Bermuda, Switzerland, New Hampshire — the rules of how people talk and joke and grieve shift in every one of those rooms. As an actor that turned out to be the gift. You also get used to walking into places where you don’t know anybody, which is kind of the job description.
Three citizenships. Canada, Ireland, Saint Kitts. Which one feels most like home?
All of them and none of them, in shifts. The honest answer is that home keeps moving. New York is home now. The places themselves stayed friends.
The solo show at The Studio at the Tank — ten years in the writing. What changed in year ten?
Time. The piece is about grieving my father, and a thing that takes a decade to write is a thing whose meaning keeps shifting underneath you. The version that goes up in May is not the version I started, and maybe it won’t be the final version. It’s interesting to see how things that I wrote when I was 16 felt so real to me then but now read as touched by satire and angst. I’m sure in ten years I will feel the same way about my 25-year-old self.
You’re workshopping Here, Time Feels So… with Andrew Reid and a musical Oresteia with Nate Weida. Different muscles?
Totally different muscles. Reid’s play sits in something quieter — the kind of room where you really listen for the silence between lines. The Oresteia at Judson is bigger and more vocal, more chorus, more weather. Different gym, same body.
And you teach elementary school in Brooklyn. Why?
Because eight-year-olds are the best directors in the world. They have no investment in your dignity. If a scene is boring, they will tell you. If a moment lands, they go feral. That kind of feedback loop is rare, and you don’t turn it down.
The solo show goes up in May, and the workshop continues and the auditions keep coming and somewhere in there Brooklyn third graders are learning to project. A nervous system that knows how to land anywhere. A repertoire that doesn’t panic. Funny, emphatic, a little off kilter — that part she got right.