Mona Ray

Writer · Performer · Multidisciplinary Storyteller

Mona Ray is a Filipina writer and performer with an inconvenient interest in human behavior. She prefers her characters exquisitely mannered and morally inconvenient: capable of remarkable tenderness, calculated ruthlessness, and a perfectly articulate defense of both. Her work gravitates toward dark humor, psychological tension, and the sort of tenderness that arrives at a thoroughly inconvenient moment.

Her attachment to the arts began with a short fiction book that earned her an award in fourth grade. By eleven, she had advanced from sixth chair to first in her sixth-grade viola section. Naturally, she took these developments as encouragement. What began as an interest became a consuming habit, and the number of disciplines involved has since become mildly unreasonable.

Her creative background spans published fiction and poetry, film, movement, and visual art. She has taught movement storytelling at Stanford University and coached artists including ((( O ))). Years of performance have sharpened her appreciation for everything a scene can communicate before anyone speaks. Dialogue is useful, of course. So is the hesitation before it.

Alongside her creative practice, Mona works in social services as a crisis interventionist for the city of San Diego. Her interest in survival, identity, and agency carries into fiction, where she gives her characters room to be resourceful, contradictory, funny, and occasionally their own least reliable witnesses.

Raised in a military family and now a mother of three, she has considerable experience adapting to changing conditions and negotiating with people who dispute the premise. Her current focus is film and narrative storytelling, with interests across performance, writing, story development, and producing.

Mona welcomes conversations with filmmakers, casting professionals, literary agents, and collaborators drawn to emotionally complex work. A sense of humor is helpful. So is a willingness to look a little closer.

Her original writing and art are created without generative AI.

Follow @MonaTheRaven for current projects, observations, and occasional dispatches from beyond the manuscript.