Geoff Kanick is an actor, director, and magician creating immersive, poetic experiences that uncover the extraordinary hidden inside the everyday. He began juggling knives at age 13 (torches came later that year) and got his first straight jacket at 14. Originally from Tacoma, Washington, and now based in New York City, his work blends illusion, improvisation, and physical theatre.

Geoff is the Founding Co-Artistic Director of LubDub Theatre Co., where he develops original work at the intersection of magic, myth, and science, including the new work The Magic Bullet. He co-created and hosted The Conjurors’ Club at the American Repertory Theater and serves as an Executive Producer of Underground Magic, a series highlighting the variety and community of contemporary magic, now streaming on Amazon Prime.

Geoff was an original cast member and resident creative team member of the Drama Desk Award–winning Queen of the Night, associate director and magic consultant for a site-specific Das Rheingold staged at Topgolf, and has performed immersive magic for Rag & Bone at New York Fashion Week. His screen work includes the indie feature Bleeding, named one of the New York Times’ “Five Horror Movies to Stream Now.”

He has also collaborated with institutions including the American Repertory Theater, HERE Arts, The Arab American National Museum, Target Margin Theater, and Fisher Center at Bard. Geoff is an alum of the SDCF Observership Program, The Orchard Project Greenhouse, and the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab. He holds an MFA with distinction from East 15 and a BA from Gonzaga University, with additional training at Shakespeare’s Globe and the London Dramatic Academy.

ARTIST STATEMENT //

I am in love with storytelling. I believe there is beauty in myth and wonder in science. 

As an artist, I am preoccupied by questions that revolve around themes of memory and ritual, beauty and absurdity, silence and waiting, the macro and micro.

My work emerges from physical improvisation, found text, writing prompts, and images.

I am most interested in ensemble-devised work. I am committed to making theatre that views the audience as a key collaborator, dissolving the boundary between performer and audience and inviting everyone into the conversation.

I like to begin with questions that grow and shift into physical gesture. Through my work with LubDub Theatre Co, I have become interested in a mode of storytelling that relies on what we call total language: fluid storytelling that shifts between words, dance, physicality, music, magic, and design. As a company, LubDub writes, embodies, connects, re-writes, re-embodies, re-connects, allowing form and content to develop symbiotically. Much of the work I make is wordless. I strive to make theatre that is fiercely physically, because I believe in the body’s ability to communicate universal truth beyond linguistic, cultural, and other barriers. For me, the most powerful moments on stage – as in life – happen in silence. In the moments between. 

Here's to oral tradition, myth, and deep truth - to being human, sitting around a table together, and delighting in mystery.