Emily Davis

Emily Davis is an American actress born and raised in Oak Cliff, a neighborhood in South Dallas, Texas. She attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Downtown Dallas before relocating to New York City to study at New York University, where she earned a BFA in Theater with a focus on acting and neurolinguistics.

Davis began her professional collaboration with Half Straddle, an Obie Award-winning New York City ensemble led by director Tina Satter, in 2009. The company has premiered ten full-length productions in addition to shorter works and video projects, with performances presented in theaters and festivals across the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Among the Half Straddle productions in which Davis has originated roles are Nurses in New England, Away Uniform, and Seagull (Thinking of you), the last of which is a reimagining of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. Outside of Half Straddle, Davis has also worked frequently with artists Erin Markey, Becca Blackwell, and Jess Barbagallo.

Davis is most widely recognized for her portrayal of whistleblower Reality Winner in Is This a Room, a verbatim staging of the FBI transcription of Winner's interrogation in June 2017. The production premiered in January 2019 at The Kitchen in New York City, where critic Helen Shaw described Davis in Artforum as "one of the most gifted realists in town." The piece subsequently ran off-Broadway at the Vineyard Theatre in fall 2019, where Ben Brantley of the New York Times called her portrayal "one of the most trenchantly observed performances of the year." For that off-Broadway performance, Davis received the Obie Award for Performance and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actress, both in 2020, and was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Lead Actress.

Davis reprised the role of Reality Winner when Is This a Room transferred to Broadway's Lyceum Theatre in 2021, marking her Broadway debut. Her screen credits include the television series Tulsa King on Paramount+, Servant on Apple TV+, and High Maintenance on HBO, as well as the films The Plagiarists and The Harbinger. She wrote and directed the short film Gwen in Corpus, in which she also appeared.