Writing has always been Claire’s first love; there are diaries, journals, short stories, novels, plays, and love letters that prove her long-held fascination with stories and words. 

Claire grew up on the Gold Coast as an opinionated, quirky, theatre-loving, chubby kid, who worked hard, but never really felt like she fit in until she started a Drama Teaching degree at university.

When Claire was twenty-five she couldn’t find a play suitable for the kids she was working with and decided, quite offhandedly, to write her own. This play, fittingly called BLOOM, changed the trajectory of her whole life. BLOOM won the Queensland Theatre Young Writers Award (2008) and secured her a place in The Royal Court Young Writers Program (2009) in London.

Claire learnt firsthand the notion that you cannot be what you cannot see, as the prospect of a career in the arts didn’t ever seem possible to her…until this moment. Writing professionally suddenly became very possible. 

She started meeting artists, having her work read aloud, and studying more. She side-stepped teaching and started working for theatre companies. Including a three- year stint in regional Queensland as the Empire Theatre Youth Arts Director (2011-2014). Eighteen months as the Youth Program Producer at Queensland Theatre (2014-2015) and then three as the Youth and Education Producer at La Boite Theatre Company (2016-2018). Claire has always returned to the classroom as a teacher throughout this time. 

She LOVES working with young people. She believes they are almost always underestimated and their art undervalued. Claire believes wholeheartedly in the power of a young person having adult allies to remind them that they are okay, exactly as they are. She believes that art changes young people, and young people will change the world. 

One of the projects Claire is most proud of is being the lead artist on TRACTION, the Queensland Theatre Logan Youth Ensemble, which was funded by The Department of Social Services. Claire worked every Wednesday making theatre with a group of about sixty young artists in Logan for four years. It changed her life. 

After years making independent theatre, producing, learning the Australian theatre landscape, Claire had an idea to write something else…a novel. This was a scary pursuit, as this was the biggest, realist dream of them all – to be an author. In 2016 she won the Text Publishing Text Prize for her debut Young Adult novel BEAUTIFUL MESS. A dual narrative story about two teenagers dealing with life’s biggest, shittiest messiest life stuff and learning to see its beauty.   

In 2017 Claire made her mainstage directorial debut directing Michelle Law’s smash hit SINGLE ASIAN FEMALE, which has since toured to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. In 2018, ten years after Claire won that first award for her first ever play she debuted her first mainstage production as a playwright, LYSA AND THE FREEBORN DAMES, a contemporary feminist riff on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. 

The end of 2019 was a fucking stellar year for Claire. She secured a three-book deal with Text Publishing to write three glorious romantic comedies. Starting with THE LIST, a pleasure-seeking quest that finds central character, Noni, trying to right the wrongs of her sexual past and inject more pleasure into her life. She won a Queensland Premiers Literary Awards Fellowship to write her second Young Adult novel THE INVISIBLES. And secured a Screen Queensland Talent Fund Grant to adapt BEAUTIFUL MESS into a screenplay.  

Claire teaches Acting at the Griffith University Conservatorium, and facilitates workshops for teenagers and teachers. 

She wishes her pug Midge could talk, and that she could have dinner with Oprah, Lindy West, Idris Elba and the entire cast of Dawson’s Creek – because CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?!?