Hi, I’m Fran Olivares Medina. I’m a Chilean theatre director, translator and facilitator based in London.

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I make theatre that is visually sharp, emotionally excessive and a bit dangerous. I'm interested in women under pressure, bodies performing identity, and the point where beauty and the grotesque start to look like each other. I like work that is funny, political, strange, intimate, uncomfortable and full of theatrical life.

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I trained as an actor at Universidad ARCIS in Chile, where I fell in love with the strangeness of what theatre can do. In 2016, I moved to London to study an MFA in Theatre Directing at East 15 Acting School, graduating with first-class honours in 2018, which still makes my mum very proud.

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During my MFA, I also trained at GITIS in Moscow, where I studied Michael Chekhov’s Psychological Gesture and Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, and in Bali, where I studied traditional Balinese theatre. These experiences shaped how I think about the body, space, rhythm, gesture and theatrical image.

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My work draws from Latin American dramaturgy, feminist performance and a strong visual imagination. I'm drawn to stories about public image and private collapse, shame and survival, desire and violence living inside the same gesture. I want audiences to feel they have entered a world that is precise, strange and emotionally alive.

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As a translator, I work with contemporary Chilean and Latin American plays, bringing them into British English while preserving their politics, humour, rhythm and strangeness. My English translation of Carla Zúñiga Morales’ The SAD Summers of Princess Diana has been published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama in Latin American Plays in Translation, and I'm currently developing the first UK staging of the play. 

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I collaborate across disciplines and communities, with particular roots in Latinx, migrant, queer and bilingual spaces. I have over fourteen years of experience across directing, assistant directing, translation, performance, teaching and community facilitation, and I hold a strong interest in the intersection of popular culture, grief, feminism and theatrical form.

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I think theatre should take you somewhere unexpected. It should make you laugh, then make you uneasy about why you laughed. It should hold contradiction – beauty and violence, tenderness and excess, the ridiculous and the devastating, all in the same room.

Let's work together!