Zoë Coombs Marr is a performer, writer, artist and comedian. She grew up in Grafton, where she and her best friend staged a musical instead of going to schoolies week.
Zoë has performed stand up comedy extensively in Australia, London and New York. Her solo show, Trigger Warning, won the Melbourne Comedy Festival Award as well as the Golden Gibbo, and two Green Room Awards. It was also nominated for Best Show at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Drama.
In 2008 Zoë completed a double degree in Performance Studies at UNSW and Fine Arts at COFA, where she was awarded the Dinosaur Designs Prize and the Art and Australia Award. Her video works and sculptures have been exhibited at a number of galleries, including First Draft, Kudos and King’s ARI and in 2006 she won the National Poetry Slam Championships under dubious circumstances.
In 2012, her solo theatre/comedy work And That Was The Summer That Changed My Life was awarded the Philip Parsons Young Playwright Award and was nominated for Best Newcomer at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Other works include Gone Off or I’ve Been Everywhere, Man (Old Fitzroy Theatre, MCF 2012, SMAC award Best On Stage 2012) and Dave (MCF 2013, Edinburgh Fringe, Soho Theatre, London). Zoë’s five-woman ensemble play Is This Thing On? was presented at Belvoir Theatre in 2014.
Zoë is also one third of the contemporary performance company post. Most recently, post’s work Oedipus Schmoedipuswas presented at Belvoir for Sydney Festival, Arts House Melbourne, and won a Green Room award for best experimental text. post’s other works include: Who’s The Best? (Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Arts House, Brisbane Powerhouse, Darwin Festival, and Noorderzon Festival, NL, 2011-2013), Everything I Know About The Global Financial Crisis In One Hour (Belvoir Theatre, 2010), Shamelessly Glitzy Work (Performance Space Sydney, Melbourne Arts House, Brisbane Powerhouse) and their newest work Ich Nibber Dibber played at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre and the Sydney Opera House in 2018.
In 2017, Zoë’s theatrical collaboration with Ursula Martinez and Adrienne Truscott, Wild Bore, premiered at the Malthouse Theatre and went on to be performed at the Soho Theatre, Edinburgh Fringe and at the Skirball Centre at NYU.
It’s worth mentioning that from 2013 Zoë most frequently appeared in comedy circles (including in her award-winning show Trigger Warning) as Dave, a retrograde male comedian with a neck beard. But in 2018 she appeared as herself, sans Dave’s neck beard, with her hit festival offering Bossy Bottom. The show saw Zoe nominated for Best Comedy Performer at the Helpmann Awards and won her a prestigious Herald Angel Award in Edinburgh. In 2020 Bossy Bottom was filmed and internationally released on Amazon Prime Video.
Since filming her Amazon special, Zoe squeezed in a flying visit to support Hannah Gadsby in San Francisco and Los Angeles for her Netflix taping, performed Bossy Bottom in LA, debuted a new show Agony! Misery! in Perth and Brisbane, co- hosted Sydney Mardi Gras for SBS and created new works in iso for the Stan Comedy Lockdown series and Melbourne Fringe’s VCR Fest. Phew.
Zoë has most recently appeared as a regular on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering, and as a guest on the latest season of Spicks & Specks.
REVIEWS / TESTIMONIALS
“This delicious meta-lasagne of insanity is unclassifiable, impossible to explain and off-the-charts, wet-your-pants brilliant. Zoe Coombs Marr is a genius.” Herald Sun
“Surprise is the foundation on which comedy is built – and Coombs Marr is a master of it.” ★★★★ The Guardian, 2018