Ashley Blom

Ashley Blom is a comedian, writer, producer, published author, occasional playwright, and Customer Success professional based in Santa Barbara, California.

Ashley has been performing comedy for more than a decade, getting her start in improv and sketch before eventually making her way to stand-up. Her comedy tends to live somewhere between personal storytelling, relationships, bad decisions, and the many small indignities of being a human person who has to interact with other human people.

She has performed at the Santa Barbara Comedy Festival, Out of Bounds Comedy Festival, and Shelter Cove Comedy Festival, as well as comedy clubs, theaters, breweries, wineries, coffee shops, and other establishments throughout California willing to hand her a microphone.

Ashley is also one-third of Wasted Potential Comedy, a female-owned comedy production team bringing affordable, high-quality stand-up shows to Santa Barbara and California’s Central Coast. In addition to performing and producing, she has taught improv at The Hideout Theatre in Austin, Texas, and Jest Improv in Ventura, California, and has developed and led improv workshops for corporate team building. She loves teaching people how to listen, react, collaborate, and occasionally make fools of themselves for productive reasons.

Long before stand-up consumed an unreasonable percentage of her free time, Ashley was a writer.

Her book, How to Eat a Lobster and Other Edible Enigmas Explained, was published in 2017 and enjoyed moderate success in the food-writing world, proving there was, in fact, an audience of people who wanted illustrated instructions for navigating life’s more confusing foods.

She has also written two one-act plays. Breakable received an award at the second annual Hanne Playwright Festival, while Replay was performed as part of the Shot of Theater show in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her fiction has appeared in The Emerson Review, which published her short works Grizzly and Purple.

Ashley also has a day job. She is a Customer Success professional in the software industry, helping customers get more value from their technology investments. Her work takes her up and down the California coast, where she trains teams on best practices, helps organizations optimize how they use software, and generally makes complicated technology feel a little less complicated.

Across all of these seemingly unrelated careers, there’s a pretty obvious throughline: Ashley likes communicating with people. Sometimes that means helping a room full of professionals understand new technology. Sometimes it means teaching a group of strangers to say “yes, and.” Sometimes it means writing a book explaining how to eat an artichoke. And sometimes it means standing onstage explaining her personal life to people who paid $15 to hear about it.

For opportunities involving stand-up comedy, improv instruction, corporate workshops, speaking, teaching, writing, or performance, Ashley can be reached at ablom10(at)gmail(dot)com.