Henry Sheeran is a film- and theater-maker currently based in Chicago, Illinois, though he will be moving back to Brooklyn this summer. In 2022, he graduated with an MFA from Northwestern’s Writing for the Screen and Stage program, where he expanded his repertoire in all directions: for film, TV, and the stage.

Since then, he co-wrote, produced, and starred in The Birthday Peasant, a modern-medieval webseries about a 13th-century peasant who gets accidentally summoned into present-day Chicago.

In October 2021, Henry’s MFA Thesis Play, Ted Bundy’s Volkswagen, had its debut reading at the Wirtz Center in downtown Chicago. The play tells the story of a young woman who, in an attempt to repair their broken relationship, takes her true-crime-loving mother on a road trip to see Ted Bundy’s VW Bug. The play is currently in pre-production for a New York premiere. Please reach out if you would like to learn more.

Henry’s short film debut, Dust Buddy, recently won Best Short Film and Audience Award at the European Short Film Festival. It was also an official selection at the NY Indie Shorts Awards and the Chicago Filmmaker Awards. Dust Buddy is a 10 minute film about a lonely, debt-ridden farmer who distracts herself from her financial situation by buying a robotic vacuum—and develops a relationship with it that becomes far more important than she could have expected. He wrote, directed, and produced the film along with co-producer Abby Brooke.

Together, Abby and Henry form a production company called Laundry Day Productions. They will be submitting their next film, Scales, to festivals starting this spring.

In the fall of 2018, Henry and co-producer Myka Cue produced Henry’s play, Gain!, which follows a motley group of college weightlifters as they struggle for dominance of each other and themselves. Written and directed by Henry, Gain!, sold out a four-week run at Sportslab Gym in Manhattan.

Henry is also a founding partner of Capital J Theater Company and the The Annual Pennington Alumni Theater Series along with lighting designer Tim Secrest.

In 2016, baby (well, 20 year-old) Henry and Tim rented the blackbox at their alma mater, The Pennington School, recruited a large team of theatermakers from among the school’s recent alumni, and produced Henry’s full-length play, Charlie and Bruno. This production morphed into an annual New Work festival called the Pennington Alumni Theater Series, which will soon enter its seventh summer, though Tim and Henry have passed the torch.

Charlie and Bruno led to a connection with Art Collins, president of The Ebony Doughboys, an all-black WWI reenactment troupe. Art commissioned a play from Henry, chronicling the life of the first black fighter pilot, Eugene Jacques Bullard. This became the 20 minute one-man show, Under A Foreign Flag, which debuted at the 2017 Governor’s Island WWI Centennial Celebration, and went on to have another performance in Charlottesville, VA, on Veteran’s Day.

In addition to writing, directing, and producing, Henry maintains an academic focus. He has maintains a scholarly focus on ethics and cultural theory in conjunction with narrative art. He is an amateur historian of postwar American and German theater, music, literature, and film, with particular interest in how social forces (fascism, collective guilt, consumerism) affect and are affected by art.

He is a 2019 Acting alum of The 24 Hour Plays: Nationals, and a 2018 alum of The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey Acting Apprentice program, where he played various roles in Titus Andronicus. At STNJ, he trained with Rick Sordelet, Devon Allen, Bonnie Monte, Brian Crowe, Bruce Cromer, Kevin Isola, and others.