Playwriting Committee
Kia Corthron
Kia Corthron’s A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick will premiere March 2010 at Playwrights Horizons in a co-production with The Play Company and the Culture Project. Last spring Trickle was part of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s One-Act Marathon. Other plays include Moot the Messenger (Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival), Light Raise the Roof (New York Theatre Workshop), Snapshot Silhouette (Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre), Slide Glide the Slippery Slope (ATL Humana, Mark Taper Forum), The Venus de Milo Is Armed (Alabama Shakespeare Festival), Breath, Boom (London’s Royal Court Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Repertory Theatre, Huntington Theatre and elsewhere), Force Continuum (Atlantic Theater Company), Splash Hatch on the E Going Down (New York Stage and Film, Baltimore’s Center Stage, Yale Rep, London’s Donmar Warehouse), Seeking the Genesis (Goodman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club), Digging Eleven (Hartford Stage Company), Life by Asphyxiation (Playwrights Horizons), Wake Up Lou Riser (Delaware Theatre Company), Come Down Burning (American Place Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre), Cage Rhythm (Sightlines/The Point in the Bronx).
Corthron’s awards include the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Residency in Italy, Playwrights Center’s McKnight National Residency, Columbia College/Goodman Theatre Fellowship, Barbara Barondess MacLean Foundation Award, AT&T On Stage Award, Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, Mark Taper Forum’s Fadiman Award, National Endowment for the Arts/TCG, Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, New Professional Theatre Playwriting Award, Callaway Award, and in television a Writers Guild Outstanding Drama Series Award and Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Wire. In December Bugs of the Pigs in the Lions will be workshopped at the Goodman Theatre.
Kia is currently a member of the Dramatists Guild Council and of the Writers Guild of America, and an alumnus of New Dramatists.
Ruth Margraff
Ruth Margraff’s plays and her Cafe Antarsia Ensemble have been presented throughout the USA, UK, Canada, Russia, Romania, Serbia, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Croatia, France, Sweden, Japan, Egypt and India. Her writings are published by Dramatists Play Service, Kendall/Hunt, Backstage Books, The Drama Review, Performing Arts Journal, American Theatre, Theater Forum, Playscripts, Inc., Applause Books, Stockyard Magazine, CUNY/Martin Segal Press, Dramatist, Johns Hopkins, NuMuse Anthology/Brown, Connotations Press, Epoch/Cornell, Conjunctions/Bard, Autonomedia, etc. Ruth is a new member of Chicago Dramatists, an alumnae of New Dramatists and HERE’s Harp artist residency and co-leader of a Theatre Without Borders initiative with Brandeis’ Coexistence International.
Ruth has taught playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, Brown University, University of Texas/Michener Center, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, etc. and she is currently Associate Professor of Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Lisa Schlesinger, Chair
Lisa Schlesinger’s plays and radio plays include Wal-martyrs, Celestial Bodies, Twenty One Positions (with Naomi Wallace and Abed Fattah Abusrour), Same Egg, Manny and Chicken, Rock Ends Ahead, Bow Echo, The Bones of Danny Winston and Leaner than Light: 12 Frames of Paul Engle. She is at work on an opera, Harmonicus Mundi, commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theatre with Portland Stage Company and funded by the Sloan Foundation, and a new play with Rivendell Theatre.
She has received commissions from the Guthrie Theatre, the BBC, and Upstart Crow Project, and the International Writing Program, and fellowships from the NEA, CEC International, the Iowa Arts Council, Humanities Iowa and the Ford and the Sloan Foundations. She is recipient of the NEA/TCG Playwrights Residency Award and winner of the BBC International Playwriting Competition. Her work has been seen and heard in countries in Europe and Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia as well as the United States and Canada.
Her prose has been published in Performing Arts Journal, Theater Magazine, American Theater, Best Monologues for Women by Women II, and other books and journals. Her essay “On the Road to Palestine” was included in the American Theater Reader, the best writing of the last 25 years of American Theater Magazine. She is a member of Theatre Without Borders, TCG, and the Dramatists Guild, and currently serves on the Board of CSPS Legion Arts. She coordinates the Playwriting Program at Columbia College Chicago.
Caridad Svich
Caridad Svich is a US Latina playwright, translator, lyricist and editor whose works have been presented across the US and abroad at diverse venues including The Women’s Project, INTAR, 59East59, Theater for the New City, McCarren Park Pool, Walkerspace, 7 Stages, Salvage Vanguard Theatre, ARTheater-Cologne, and Edinburgh Fringe Festival/UK. The summer 2009 issue of American Theatre magazine featured a significant profile about her work.
Among her key plays: 12 Ophelias, Any Place But Here, Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues, Fugitive Pieces, Iphigenia…a rave fable, Instructions for Breathing, The Tropic of X, The Booth Variations and The House of the Spirits (based on the novel by Isabel Allende). She has translated nearly all of Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays as well as works by Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca, Julio Cortazar and new plays from Spain, Cuba and Mexico and has freely adapted works by Wedekind, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare.
She’s a former Harvard/Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellow and has received grants from the NEA, TCG, Pew Charitable Trusts and California Arts Council. She has edited several books on theatre and performance including Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries (Manchester University Press) and Divine Fire (BackStage Books). Her work is published by TCG, Smith & Kraus, Playscripts and more. She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists, founder of theatre alliance & press NoPassport, associate editor of Routledge’s Contemporary Theatre Review and contributing editor of TheatreForum. She is member of PEN American Center, The Dramatists Guild and is featured in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino History. She holds an MFA from UCSD. (www.caridadsvich.com)
Sheri Wilner
Sheri Wilner’s plays include Father Joy, Hunger, Bake Off, Labor Day, Relative Strangers, Moving Shortly, Little Death of a Salesman, The Unknown Part of the Ocean, Hell and Back, The Bushesteia, Equilibrium, The First Night of Chanukah, The End and Joan of Arkansas. Her work has been performed at major regional and national theatres including the Guthrie Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Summer Play Festival, Naked Angels, Philadelphia Theatre Company, Contemporary American Theater Festival, The Women’s Project, New Georges, Rattlestick Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, Primary Stages, City Theatre, Illusion Theater, Emigrant Theatre and the History Theatre. In addition, Father Joy was developed by the Old Vic/New Voices program in London.
Playwriting awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Bush Artist Fellowship, two Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowships and two Heideman Awards, granted by the Actors Theatre of Louisville; in 1998 for Labor Day, which premiered at the 1999 Humana Festival, and in 2001 for Bake Off, which premiered at the 2002 Humana Festival. Her work has been published in over a dozen anthologies including New Playwrights: The Best New Plays of 1999; The Best One-Act Plays from the Women’s Project, and The Best American Short Plays 2000-2001, among others. In addition, Playscripts.com has published twelve of her one-acts, which have received over one hundred productions all over the United States as well as in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Japan, United Kingdom and India.
Her latest play, Kingdom City, received a workshop at the Tofte Lake Center in Minnesota in July 2009 and will be produced at the University of California, Santa Barbara in February 2010. She attended Cornell University, received her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University and resides in New York City where she teaches playwriting at Primary Stages School of Theatre.
