We are Nora and Tessa, and we love pasta.
Even more than that, we love BIG PASTA: bold, dynamic, YUMMY noodles that are meant to be shared. We met in 2014 while studying abroad in London, and fell a little in love over a desire to make art that is at once beautiful and grotesque, that breaks down the human experience into moments of deep joy and absurd honesty. Since then, we’ve written a play (Baby Goes Down — ask us about it) which we produced in Brooklyn, and have continued to develop art that reckons with the awful and amazing moments that exist between living and dying. We also love cooking and eating and dancing too hard in the kitchen. And that’s what brought us to the Big Pasta Podcast. We hope that through our exploration of all things noodles, we can nourish each other, we can grow through a difficult time, we can find and share the joy that is working and laughing in the kitchen.
Made with help from our friends!
Jane Zisman designed our podcast art, and Olivia Zisman drew episode art. Check them out!
Ian McNally composed our podcast music! Check him out!
Tessa Barlow-Ochshorn is a Brooklyn raised and based theater artist with a deep love for physical, ensemble-driven storytelling and facilitating equitable, joyful collaborations. Her primary work over the last decade has been as an actor/mover, but she is emerging into a collage that includes writing, directing, and devising. As a performer she has worked with various companies around the city and the state — she has worked as far away as South Africa and as near as Central Park. As a director, Tessa looks to joyful discovery and generosity above all else, and she has mainly worked on pieces she co-wrote or devised, with companies like Neon Nature and The No Name Collective. She co-wrote a play, “Baby Goes Down,” with Nora Kaye, which she directed in Brooklyn. Educational theater includes time with Stages On the Sound, Brooklyn Acting Lab, and HYPE! Mimes. Film includes work with NIA Productions and Ben Haven Taylor. Her first (somewhat) solo piece, “How To Wake Up!” premiered as part of the 2021 Exponential Festival at The Brick.
Nora Kaye is an independent filmmaker/playwright/actor/director/producer/foley artist based in Brooklyn, NY who loves to collaborate! Through her various modes of work, she looks to explore the surreal, the grotesque, the complexities of human relationships and neuroscience, often through dark comedy; committed to telling stories from new perspectives in this golden age of theater, television, filmmaking and audio. Her favorite collaborations include Hysterical Women (2018) an independent dark comedy pilot about gender-inequality in the workplace which she co-created with Whitney Uland (winner of the Jury and Audience Award at Bentonville Film Festival and the official selection for Catalyst Film Festival, Seriesfest and New York Independent Film Festival), The Cosmos Sisters (shot December 2020), a feature she co-wrote, co-directed and starred in about two grieving friends and a failed middle school band and Baby Goes Down, her full-length play written with Tessa Barlow-Ochshorn, a play in conversation with Fefu and Her Friends by Maria Irene Fornés, about friendship, death and lasagna, workshopped in New York in 2018. When not writing or filmmaking, she enjoys cooking Big Pasta and singing improvised songs to my cat Frankly. Nora is repped by A3.