LISA HAYES is an accomplished actor, playwright, director and educator.   She is perhaps best known for her two one-woman shows.  Jane Eyre has been featured at venues across Great Britain and the United States, and in 2002 was the only American production featured in the inaugural season of the Prague Fringe Festival.   Since its limited run off-Broadway in 2003, Hayes’ play Nurse! has toured to theatres and conferences in the U.S. and abroad.  The play revolves around a contemporary nursing strike and is based on oral histories she did with nurses in Buffalo, NY and nurses from Long Island involved with a 104-day strike in 2002.   Nurse! was recently featured at the International Oral History Conference in Rome, Italy, at  an international theatre conference in Nova Scotia and at the Michigan Nurses Association convention at the famous Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.

Hayes created the role of "Rachel" in Arlene Hutton's As It Is In Heaven, which had its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Scotland) and moved to off-Broadway in New York.  Television appearances include All My Children and One Life to Live.  Other performance credits include: Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Taming of the Shrew (Baltimore); scenes from Hamlet and Henry V with an ensemble of British and American actors (Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, London); and The Price You Pay and Houseplay (The Journey Company at the Piccolo Spoleto and New York International Fringe Festivals).  Hayes is also a performer in Western New York’s longest-running show, DIVA by DIVA: A Celebration of Women.

Hayes directed the U.S. premiere of the Canadian hit musical “We’re Still Hot!” for O’Connell & Company in Buffalo.  With Mary Kate O’Connell, she has written several shows, including The Sad Sacks Are Back (based on WWII oral histories, and featuring big band music from the period),  The Lysistrata Project (adapted in the style of an old-time radio show),  and the comedy The Trailer Park Diaries.  Hayes is collaborating with journalist Suzanne Gordon on the play Bedside Manners, about doctor/nurse communication, which has been presented at the New York Academy of Medicine, Cedars Sinai Hospital and the United Association of Nurses. 

Hayes is active in the field of Museum Theatre, and taught a course on the subject at the University at Buffalo that was a collaboration between the Theatre and Dance Department and the Buffalo Museum of Science.  She is currently teaching a course on Art and Social Consciousness at UB, which will culminate in a student presentation on arts activism at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center. Hayes, a graduate of the University of Washington drama program and the Joan White English Theatre School in London, is now a PhD candidate in American Studies at UB.  She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, AEA, SAG, AFTRA, the International Museum Theatre Alliance and The Players.