Calvin Ray Shawler fell in love with the performing arts from an early age as a means of personal expression and radical imagination. They pursue it unswervingly through music and theatre, writing and directing many full length theatre pieces including The Transit Trilogy (2024), a triptych musical exploring environmental concerns, trans identity, and grief through through different modes of transportation; Mirror Mirror (2023), an intimate musical experience using fairy tales and love songs to explore how we’ve been taught to love others and ourselves; and [INSERT future HERE] (2022), which garnered a Tri-Valley Innovators Award for high schoolers in the Bay Area.

Recent onstage roles include Peter in Wolf Play and Baz in A Bright Room Called Day. They have also written and directed experimental short films “Things I Should Probably Throw Out” (2022), and “one step at a time orpheus and eurydice draw closer to the morning sun” (2024), which have garnered awards from the Las Po Film Festival in Livermore, California.

They are the Bay Area Creative Foundation’s 2023 Creative Youth Award recipient, and their prolific classical composition catalog has acquired awards from United States Open Music Competition and from the MusicIN Artist Competition. Their piece “Order” was commissioned and premiered by the Poiesis Quartet and has additional performances scheduled in New York and at the Louvre in Paris. They currently study Music Composition at Oberlin, and work as Conservatory Editor for the Oberlin Review.