Larissa has directed and workshopped plays for companies around the country, including Cherry Lane, The Plawrights’ Center, Portland Center Stage, Dorset Theatre Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, Southern Rep, New Georges, Ma-Yi, New Jersey Rep, Urbanite, Keen Company’s Keen Teens, McCarter Theatre’s Youth Ink!, Curious Theatre Company, Lake Dillon, Passage Theatre, Abingdon/Small Pond, Leviathan Lab, Prospect Theatre, and of course American Southwest Theatre Company at NMSU.

In 2015, she became one of five inaugural recipients of the National Directors Fellowship (co-sponsored by The O’Neill, National New Play Network, SDCF and the Kennedy Center). In 2017, she received a Process Space residency for the development of a new movement theater-based piece through LMCC. Through a 2016-17 New Georges Audrey Residency, she helped to develop Thrive, or What You Will by L M Feldman—an ensemble piece about Jeanne Baret, a botanist who became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.  She and Feldman also received a Sloan Commission through Ensemble Studio Theatre for their current project, M13 [working title], about thirteen female pilot-would-be-astronauts. In 2005, she was granted an AREA award from chashama for the site specific Porch Plays.

Other devised/collaborative projects include a contemporary telling of the Persephone myth, which she co-conceived and created with playwright Lauren Yee and composer Pearl Rhein and YURI (a part-fact-mostly-fictional telling of the first human orbit), which she devised with an ensemble and wrote herself. YURI was originally performed as a part of the “Winter Mix” at The New Ohio Theatre in NYC, with support from New Georges, and an excerpt of it was recently staged with NMSU students for the Las Cruces Space Festival.

She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab and the National Alliance of Acting Teachers.  She is an Affiliated Artist with New Georges, an Associate Member of the SDC, and was a Resident Director at Ensemble Studio Theatre in 2008-09.  She earned her BS in Theatre from Northwestern University and her MFA in Directing from UC San Diego.