Fran Pado is a New York City based playwright and musician

…whose work fuses the eerie logic of fairy tales with the rawness of experimental theater and scary, beautiful music. Her unsettling, poetic worlds are driven by spooky, atonal narrative and sound. They hover between childhood and nightmare - fairy tales for grown-ups.

Influenced by artists such as Richard Foreman, Mac Wellman, Elizabeth Swados, and the magical worlds of Talking Band and 600 Highwaymen, Pado’s work also draws from her own lived landscape: blue-collar New Jersey, suburban myths, and ancestral trauma. These influences shape plays that pulse with haunting imagery, unsettling humor, and emotional reckoning.

Her shows have been produced at 155 Coffey Street, Chashama, Autoversion Gallery, Bloodmiel Performance Space, Dixon Place, and The Brick Theater. Pado's bold, odd voice resists easy labels—it is theatrical, incantatory, and steeped in the strange and sad beauty of damaged worlds. Whether conjuring lost children, spectral suburbs, or fractured minds, she invites audiences into spaces where myth and memory intertwine and the familiar becomes terrifying and uncanny.

Music always been a part of Pado’s performances, and she has been the lyricist and vocalist for bands that range from folk-experimental to compositions for her song cycles. Her band, Goddess, used sticks, street-find keyboards, and a homemade horsehair fiddle to create experimental-psych songs for 22 years. Goddess has five releases, one on stunning 180 gm vinyl that was named “ Best Album of the Year” by NY Rock Daily in 2015. Pado has played venues such as the Sculpture Center, Queens Museum, Wave Hill, and practically every downtown hole in sight.Her heavy-metal a cappella project, Krampus, kept the experimental vibe but added velvet capes and scary-not-scary choral wails. Their low-key legendary show at the Grassy Knoll ended, for no reason, with a smoky sing-along of “Leaving On A Jet Plane.” Pado’s current band, Moss Cathedral, is an orchestra of reverb, cello, and angelic harmonies. They’re busy in the studio, release in March.