RAINA WILLIAMS

r☆! (any) is a New York-based director, lighting designer, and artist who was born and raised in Nashville, TN. 

Growing up in the unrelenting Dirty South, they have learned to navigate their relationship to androgyny & Blackness. Sticking true to their core of combining communal healing with art, they are persistent in upholding the promise to subvert conventional, normalized, and popular culture.

Through multi-media visual storytelling and bold insight, r☆! aims to create meta art for viewers to consider their present realities in relation to the work they’re engaging with. By working across disciplines, they use their lived experience — being perceived as a “marginalized other” — to encapsulate the world we hope for, not the world as it is. By collaborating on new works (plays, installations, etc.), whether new to them or new to the world, they are able to synthesize & display their hope for a better world, livelihood, and reality.