Spark Artist

Born in Portland, Oregon, Amber Kay Ball is a theatre maker, visual artist, and community-based advocate. Amber draws inspiration for their work from ancestral and contemporary ways of being and knowing. Traditionally, their people are from Southern Oregon and Northern California. As a contemporary Native multi-practice artist, Amber uses Directing, Playwriting and beadwork as mediums for sharing stories, truths, laughter and joy. These mediums allow them to critically explore, honor, and weave Native pasts, presents, and futures in a just and liberated format. 

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Most recently, Amber was the Assistant Director for, Little Ones, a new opera staged reading with Renegade Opera. Amber’s play, Finding BigFoot, was awarded a Grow Grant and selected for the Fertile Ground PDX New Play festival as a premiere staged reading at Barbies Village. A recent co-recipient of the Precipice Fund through Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts to support Native Playwrights Series PDX. Amber has previously directed with First Storytellers Festival, Reflections of Native Voices Festival with Safe Harbors NYC, Red Eagle Soaring Native Youth Theatre as well as a workshop production of, Tipi Tales From the Stoop, at New York Theatre Workshop. Amber was a recipient of the Indigenous Place Keeping Artist Fellowship through the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and received a Community Mentor Award from Southern Oregon University’s Native American Studies Department. Among the inaugural cohort of the National New Play Network's Bridge Program's Producing Cohort and served as an Executive Producer for The New American Theatre Festival with In the Margin and B Street Theatre in Sacramento, CA. She has additionally served as a Mentor Artist for Indigenous Youth Digital Collective.