Erin Markey
| Erin Markey | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1981 Michigan, USA |
| Residence | Brooklyn |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan |
| Occupation | Writer, comedian, performance artist |
| Website | Erin Markey's website |
Erin Markey (born 1981) is an American writer, comedian, and performance artist. Markey's work combines elements of cabaret theater and comedy and often incorporates stories of her childhood in the Midwest. The New York Times has described Markey as having "a cult following as an alt-cabaret star with swaggering confidence and off-kilter sense of humor."
Markey was born in Michigan in 1981. She was raised Catholic. Her father was a marketer in telecommunications and her mother was a medical assistant. In high school, Markey flirted with being a "Bible Belt Christian," due to the influence of friends and her sense that " it felt like really impassioned, relatively speaking, to Catholicism." In high school, Markey informed her parents that she wanted to become a performer, rather than a veterinarian, which made her mother "really mad." Markey studied performance in college at the University of Michigan, taking a class taught by well-known performance artist Holly Hughes. After college, Markey worked for five months at a strip club, an experience that, according to a New York Times profile, was "helpful in developing her confidence and stage presence." Markey drew upon this experience in several performance works.
Markey has described, in an interview published in Bomb, her self-imposed separation from her family after she came out as gay, a period she described as "wonderful break of me being able to just develop artistically outside the bounds of me feeling as accountable to them." In the same interview, Markey described her misgivings and anxieties about her family seeing her work, which draws upon their family life. Markey explained: "It’s not exactly dirty laundry, but just things that feel private are like, being made into a show where tons of people are watching it."
In 2010, Markey's show "Puppy Love: A Stripper's Tail" was produced at Performance Space 122 in New York City. Based on Markey's experiences working as a stripper after college, "Puppy Love" was praised as "a must-see tale/tail for all you ladies and gents (but mostly ladies) who work in the gray area between theater and erotic arts in New York. It’s also worth seeing if you don’t work in that lovely, glistening niche of the alternative entertainment world."Michelle Tea praised "Puppy Love," calling it
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