Nanna Ingvarsson is a stage actress with a career spanning over 30 years in regional theater who recently relocated to Cleveland Heights, OH after many productive years in the Washington, DC area with husband (actor Brian Hemmingsen) and son. She is a member of SAG-AFTRA and an Equity Membership Candidate, and has worked extensively with companies including Scena Theatre, Forum Theater, Constellation Theater, Solas Nua, and The Beck Center.
Reviewers across decades — from the Washington Post to Broadway World — consistently single out the same qualities: extraordinary range and precision in character transformation, command of highly demanding text (Beckett's Not I being the extreme example), and a magnetic, authoritative stage presence. She is praised equally for comedy and tragedy, and for an ability to make even grotesque or morally complex characters feel human and specific. The word that recurs most across her reviews is "riveting."
I knew, when I read [Terminus], that Nanna Ingvarsson was the only choice.
Nanna Ingvarsson is a two-time Helen Hayes Award winner — DC theater's highest honor — taking Outstanding Lead Actress for The Amish Project (2014) and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Musical for The Rocky Horror Show (1992), with several additional nominations across her career. She is particularly associated with challenging, text-heavy work: Samuel Beckett, Jon Fosse, Martin McDonagh, and demanding one-woman or small-cast pieces. Her signature role is The Amish Project, a one-woman show in which she played seven distinct characters.
Nanna was nominated for a 2015 Helen Hayes Award, Outstanding Supporting Actress – Helen Production for her work as Eileen in the Scena Theatre production of The Cripple of Innishmaan.
She was also nominated in 2014 for two Helen Hayes Awards in the category of Outstanding Lead Actress – Helen Production for her work in both The Amish Project at Factory 449, and Terminus at Studio Second Stage. Nanna won the award for her one-woman performance in The Amish Project.
She has also received ensemble nominations for Solas Nua's production of Scenes from the Big Picture, directed by Des Kennedy, and Forum Theater's production of Angels in America, directed by Jeremy Skidmore (Part 1) and Michael Dove (Part 2).
Nanna is a recipient of a Boomerang Fund for Artists grant.
"Nanna Ingvarsson is so phenomenal in these three harrowing short plays by Samuel Beckett that one can easily imagine the Nobel Prize-winning minimalist notoriously persnickety about his stage directions rising from the grave (center stage, a six-by-two rectangular hole, in nearly no light) and exclaiming (in a hoarse whisper): Yes, yes, that's precisely what I meant. And then (brushing dust from his cadaverous face): If only I were still alive, I could write another playlet for her. (Whereupon, woebegone, he slowly disappears into the hole. Ten-second pause. Fade to black.)"
"The X-Men and other morphers have nothing on Nanna Ingvarsson, the local actress fluidly shape-shifting into seven characters that form a community united by tragedy."
"Ingvarsson takes a perfectly ordinary person — intelligent, certainly, but weighed down by a life of mediocrity — and turns her into someone we can love and support. Ingvarsson does so many little things with Emmi which engage our attention that by the end you might walk away feeling that this is a true story about your favorite aunt."