How We Survive Productions is born of the brilliance and friendship of Carrie Rudzinski and Olivia Hall.
Internationally renowned poets and performers, Carrie and Olivia began collaborating in 2016 and have created three poetry theatre shows together:
How We Survive (2019), Hysterical (2022), and The Bitching Hour (2023).
Hysterical won Best New Aotearoa Play at the Wellington Theatre Awards and Outstanding Performance Poetry at the Auckland Fringe Festival and was performed over 60 times.
How We Survive Productions has performed at Taranaki Winter Festival, Hawkes Bay Arts Festival, and a full run at Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They have published two books of poetry and a spoken word album.
Carrie and Olivia's poetry is confronting and accessible; angry and loving; powerful and needed. It reminds us this is how we survive: together.
Carrie Rudzinski (She/her) has performed over the past 20 years in 6 countries and across the United States. Featured in Bustle, HuffPost and Teen Vogue, her poems have been published in such collections as Landfall, The Spinoff, Stasis Journal, Takahe, Sweet Mammalian, Turbine, Catalyst, and Muzzle.
She won the Pussy Riot award at the Auckland Fringe Festival, received a standing ovation at Tedx Christchurch, and ranked 4th in the world at the Women of the World Poetry Slam.
Carrie is the co-editor of Rapture: An Anthology of Performance Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2023) and completed her MA in Creative Writing with Distinction at Victoria University of Wellington.
Find her on instagram @Splintercheek
Olivia Hall (she/her) is a kiwi poet with a Masters Degree in Gender, who has also lived and performed in New York and London. In New York she won multiple poetry slams at the famous Bowery Poetry club, and in London she was the 2019 Genesis Slam Champion, and made the top six at the 2021 Hammer and Tongue National Final. Liv has been performing poetry for eight years and came third at the 2015 New Zealand Slam Championships. She previously helped organise and run Poetry in Motion in Wellington and won the 2015 Matariki Slam, the 2016 Capital Slam and the 2017 Wellington Fringe Festival Slam. Her work was published in the 2020 Poets Versus Sexual Harassment anthology, produced in partnership with UN Women in the UK. She is still not really sure what she wants to do with her life or where to call home, but recently moved from London to Auckland, New Zealand with her partner.
Find her on Instagram @livs_hall