Bio
Geek comedian. Relentlessly honest. Created interactive performances by mashing up theatre, stand-up and the Net.
She has also appeared in: npr, boingboing.net, TechTV, Air America, WIRED, Yahoo Financevision, The Wall Street Journal, The Toronto Globe and Mail, The San Jose Mercury News, WHERE Magazine, shift TV, Fortune.com, thestreet.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Curve, Backstage Pass, the Austin Chronicle and CBC Radio.
Sample third-party triangulation of awesomeness:    “I Look Like An Egg, but I Identify As A Cookie†an interactive baking comedy: Oakland Tribune “Best of the Bay,†Curve Magazine: National Lesbian Theatre Award, year-long SF run, Ars Nova (NY), SXSW (Austin), Shotgun Cabaret (Berkeley). Over 50,000 cookies served.
Sample venues: Dixon Place (NY), Shotgun Players (Berkeley), ArsNova (NY), SF Sketchfest, UCLA, Syracuse University, SxSW, Ladyfest, Gotham NY, The Marsh (SF), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Maryville College (TN), GirlBar (LA), Red Devil Lounge, Purple Onion (SF), The Earl (Atlanta), JCCSF Elinor Friend Center for the Arts, Kansas University, Buddies In Bad Times Theatre (Toronto, Great American Music Hall (SF), Bowery Poetry Club (NY), The Vortex (Austin).
Storytelling:CBC’s Definitely Not the Opera, Porchlight, Litquake, Snap Judgement’s Snap Salon.
Press kudos: “brilliant†and “one of our favorite comedians†(boingboing.net), “radical…consensual comedy” – Hairpin; “A set of wits equal to any on comedy central” -Austin Chronicle; featured on NPR’s Technation, nominated as “America’s funniest lesbian” by Curve.
Other honors: AirSpace Residency at Jon Sims, Theatre Bay Area Grant, Zellerbach Foundations Grant, invited to discuss comic innovations at Playwright’s Horizon conference.
As a Public Speaker has hosted at, performed and keynoted many conferences and companies including: Google, Web Directions South DUX, Popkomm, Canada Music Week, SxSWinteractive, TEDxBayArea, UXWeek, WordCamp, dorkbot, Overlap, Google, Web 2.0, WebVisions, GigaOm, SuperNova, Public Democracy Forum (PDF), TechSoup, Doug Rushkoff’s ContactCon, Connect Up (the gathering of major NGOs in from Australia and New Zealand) and YLE, Finland’s BBC.
Net cred: part of first webcasting team (Apple) + iPod/iTunes precursor (Fuse)
Shared the stage with: Macarthur Genius winners Biil Irwin and Majora Carter, Broadway solo performer Lisa Kron, Tribe 8’s Lynnee Breedlove, Larry Lessig, Judy Gold, Will Durst, Maria Bamford, Sandra Shamas, Betsy Salkind, Patton Oswalt and Margaret Cho.
Live/online interactive talk show: subvert with heather gold (f/k/a the Heather Gold Show)The Heather Gold Show (tHGS) hosts conversations we’re craving. Everyone participates with help from a mashup of amazing guests from the geekerati and beyond. Everyone is their own expert. Whenever possible, there’s cake.
Past guests include Creative Common founder Lawrence Lessig, novelist Michelle Tea, Darfur survivor Elijah Riek, and twitter co-founder Ev Williams.
For example, the first show mashed up flickr co-founder Caterina Fake about how one becomes self-made with other self-made people she’d otherwise never meet: brilliant, octogenarian psychologist Dr. Lillian Rubin and W. Kamau Bell.
Book Heather for your venue or college.
narrative-style
Driven to comedy by law school, Heather Gold continues to mix mind with matter. Heather’s unique style is a reflection of her unorthodox artistic path, reflecting her studies at Yale, Northwestern Law, Groundlings, improv legend Cynthis Szigeti (who’s been a big influence on other students like Conan O’Brien and Lisa Kudrow) years in the geek and entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley.
Heather has the unique ability to make connections between the most unlikely things, and create an immediate intimacy with any audience. Her monologues and riffing stand-up performances fuse personal stories, social observation and conversation. She counts Paul Mooney, Uncabaret, Alice Waters and the Internet among her influences.Her shows and panels had a big impact on the formative years of SXSWinteractive. While performing for her geek audience at SXSW one year, Heather discovered the audience was funny too and began experimenting with open sourcing elements of her shows.
“People are interested in each other. Performance has always been a way of having a unifying collective experience. Today, live performance has an opportunity to do what Congress, towns, big media and perhaps our courts are failing to do: Be a public space in which we can be our whole selves together. This is theatre as commons.”
Heather’s hosted Austin Gay Pride, written for actor Alan Cumming, and starred in her debut solo show—”I Look Like An Egg, but I Identify As A Cookie“—in which she bakes chocolate chip cookies with the audience. Cookie ran for over a year in San Francisco and was named Best of the Bay by The Oakland Tribune and recognized by Curve magazine in 2004 with their National Theatre Award. Heather won this award in 2005 for The C Word, co-written and performed with Jen Kober. In 2006, Cookie workshopped at invitation at Ars Nova, one of Off-Broadway’s hottest new theatres, which has worked with comic talents like Sarah Silverman, Sandra Bernhard and Julia Sweeney.
Heather emcees and performs for venues and clients across North America, and contributes to magazines and newspapers like The San Jose Mercury News, the Toronto Globe & Mail and CBC Radio. Heather hosted the weekly podcast Tummelvision.tv the leading show about social engagement in a networked world and co-hosted the comic podcast Morning Jew. She’s been quoted and covered in places like WIRED, Salon and NPR. Heather is one of the creators of EqualityCamp, which brought geeks and activists together around the current gay marriage movement and Tech Solidarity. She’s a Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Mark Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.
Her second show The Law Project, won grants from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and Theatre Bay Area and was performed at Dixon Place during the Hot Festival. Her talk show The Heather Gold Show got past the surface with inspiring innovators and artists like Maria Bamford, Larry Lessig and Ev Williams and played SF Sketchfest. She recently enjoyed working with director Kevin Clarke on “Cookie” which Shotgun Players produced in both 2013 and 2014. Heather is currently at work on her next interactive show Everything is Subject to Change. She created and hosts Yarn, the comic storytelling show, especially for women who are Hollywood Old (over 29). She lives in Oakland.
Public speaking and hosting
Bring Heather to speak and enliven your company or conference’s next event.
Get in touch with your specific needs.
What People are Saying
“deeper than Oprah…and has a set of wits equal to any major player on Comedy Central.” –Austin Chronicle
“Brilliant” – Boing Boing
Selected Clips
CBC radio – Definitely Not the Opera (a national storytelling show, a bit like This American Life) Geek Prayer, In or Out of the Club, Redemption, Who Were You At Camp?
New York Times | NPR Circuits pilot
CBC Spark: A short, This American Life-ish piece about videoblogging. Listen 20 min in
CBC Sounds Like Canada: Part of a conversation about the Canadian + American federal elections
Selected Press
She sets the Gold Standard for Comedy in the Bay Area – J Weekly
Consensual Comedy – The Hairpin
Why We’re Falling in  Love with Podcasts – The Mercury News
“Best of the Bay” – Oakland Tribune – (Cookie)
One of Feministing’s Favorite Funny Feminists
Interviews
Four Comedians Share What It’s Like to be Queer in Stand Up: – on Into
“different than what most people think of as stand-up” On The Hairpin (also The Awl and Splitsider)
feature interview on npr’s TechNation w Moira Gunn
video: British Open University
SheKnows: How Humor Can Hack Social Change
podcast: Evil Genius Chronicles “Heather Gold rocks my world.”
radio WFMU (NY) Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Squat at Personal Democracy Forum
