Sophie Amieva is a Brooklyn-based French/Spanish theater-maker, director, choreographer, teacher, physical actor (mime, clown, mask) and Butoh dancer.
Amieva is the founder, producer and Artistic Director of notAmuse Theater, which she founded in 2016. The company has a mission to disrupt ingrained patterns of hegemony, provoking critical thinking and empowering untold stories. She deconstructs these narratives through extensive research into social history, art history and sociology. Stylistically, notAmuse utilizes and blends the contrasting yet complimentary performance forms of Bouffon/clowning and Butoh. She views masks, objects and environment as active elements of our performance language, and her work explores the intersections between them.
In 2016, at Happy Lucky no.1 an Art Gallery in Brooklyn, she led a 6 months rehearsal process, open to the public, for “Facets” and “The Diamond”, two improvisational works on dance and mask. “The Diamond” was also performed with 26 participants at the Park Avenue Armory for the Nick Cave exhibition The Let Go. In the decade that followed, the company has produced critically acclaimed original theater projects including “the leg.” (2025), “Dread Fools” (2022) and “Medusa Volution” (2018 and 2020) which have been described by critics as “funny, unnerving, elusive, and bold” (Theatre Beyond Broadway) and “captivating” (Thinking Theatre NYC).
As a collaborator, deviser, director and movement director, Amieva has worked on many productions including the recent “Meat Suit” with Aya Ogawa at Second Stage and a work-in-process piece entitled “Examined Life” (presented at the Prelude Festival 2019) through a collaboration with writer and philosopher Regan Pennaluna. She also directs both new works and revivals of plays by writers from Rainer Fassbinder or Jean Cocteau.
She has taught acting, physical comedy and mask (Bouffons; clowning) internationally for over twenty years, with fifteen at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Previously, she co-founded and directed Brooklyn Beanstalk, a French and Spanish immersion program for children that used clowning and theater as a tool for language acquisition.
She started her career as a performer in France and has performed with renowned companies like Philippe Genty Company, la Rumeur and toured with the French grotesque street theater collective La Grappe de Bouffons. Since arriving in New York in 2001, she has worked with the National Theater of the United State of America (N.T.U.S.A), International Wow and the Bindlestiff Family Circus. In 2006, at HERE, she presented “Pessimist, Moi?!,” a one woman show about femininity and loneliness. Her work has been seen in France at the National Stage des Louvrais, le Théâtre 95, le Samovar, la grande Galerie de L’évolution, le Théâtre d’Edgar, le Théâtre du bout, les Douches and in New York at HERE, La Mama, CBGB’s, the Palace of Variety of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, the Ontological Hysteric Theater, Happy Lucky no1, Chashama, Galapagos Art Space, Theater for a New City, the Brick, MITU580 and Second Stage, as well as regionally at MAAS in Philadelphia, amongst others.
Recently she shot two short movies as an actor in Molly Gillis’ “Plaisir” and Shaina Feinberg’s “Cleo from 8:20 to 2:35.”
Her work has been recognised multiple times by the Brooklyn Art Council, the Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Fund, NYSCA and Bloomberg Philanthropies, and recent residencies include Mercury Store, Culture Lab and and the cell.