Anthony Crosby creates and inhabits site-specific, immersive performances that challenge conventions and push the boundaries of genres and forms. Crosby’s work is deeply shaped by the specific space it inhabits. He takes a formalist approach to creation, often resulting in symbolic or expressionist works that operate on multiple sensory and conceptual levels. Crosby treats theatre’s conventions as sculptural material. He aims to create immersive, transformative experiences closer to ritual than representation; pursuing a total theatre that activates the body, space, and audience alike.

Crosby is the associate artistic director of the Philadelphia-based artist collective Die-Cast. Named after the pressurized metal casting process that creates a new object by forcing molten metal into a mold, Die-Cast creates work that fills space in found sites. Crosby has created over a dozen site-specific pieces with Die-Cast, filling spaces such as historic mansions, a dilapidated hotel, a replica schooner, an abandoned wharf, a closed nightclub, Discord chat rooms, and entire websites. Their work considers the nature of time (in both the staging and the content of the pieces), and often explores human connection, dreams, cults, conspiracies, and the insignificance of human existence.

Die-Cast’s Temporary Occupancy won the $20,000 Juried Grand Prize in the No Vacancy Festival for Miami Art Week 2020. The piece was a public works installation featuring six performers in the rooms, hallways, and courtyard of the Betsy Motel. A live stream followed the performers through the hotel and was projected on a two-story building on Ocean Drive for 10 nights.

The Snagglepuss Chronicles, Die-Cast’s staged reading of their adaptation of Mark Russell’s Exit Stage Left; the Snagglepuss Chronicles, was nominated for “Best Comic Adaptation” at the 2019 Harvey Awards, rightfully losing to Columbia Pictures’ and Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. 

In 2016, Crosby and his collaborators Brenna Geffers (director/co-creator) and Amanda Schoonover (co-creator/star) were nominated for a “Best Choreography” Barrymore award for the original Philadelphia production of It Girl, which explored the disposability of female artists in the entertainment industry through the performance of a “live silent film” based on the life of American silent film star Clara Bow. It Girl went on to headline the inaugural New Jersey Fringe Festival and tour from Whitefish, Montana to Los Angeles, California.

Crosby is currently an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College.