Ms Karen Malpede

Bio

Karen Malpede (playwright/director/co-producer) is author of 15 plays produced in the United States, Europe and Australia, as well as short fiction, and essays and articles on theater and human rights. Her newest play “Another Life” will be published in The Kenyon Review, Fall 2010; she will direct a staged reading at Dixon Place September 21, 2010. “Prophecy” will be published in the anthology Acts of War: Iraq & Afghanistan in Seven Plays (Northwestern University Press, March 2011). She has previously directed her own scripts: “I Will Bear Witness” (Classic Stage, Theater J, New End Theatre, London; English-Language Theater, Berlin) “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” (Dionysia World Festival of Contemporary Drama, Italy; Florence Mission Project, New York) “Better People,” (Theater for the New City, Magic Theater, SF) “Sappho & Aphrodite,” (Cleveland Public Theater). With Lydia Koniordou of the Greek National Theater, she created a three-month training program in Greek tragedy at the Tisch School of the Arts which culminated in the staging of her adaptation of Christa Wolf’s novel Cassandra. Her early plays are collected in A Monster Has Stolen the Sun and Other Plays; “A Lament for Three Women,” “Us” and “Better People” have been anthologized. She is a McKnight National Playwrights Fellowship winner; a NYFA & Vogelstein grant recipient, a co-founder of Theater Three, a member of PEN. She was a co-founder of the Woman’s Salon for Literature. After September 11, 2001, she worked as an oral historian taking testimonies from witnesses and survivors for the Columbia University Oral History Archives. In 1995, she traveled to Bosnia and Croatia to work with drama students who had been under siege and in combat. She twice represented the U.S. at the International Experimental Theater Festival in Cairo. She has created theater with Chilean survivors of torture and with formerly battered women. She co-produced two annual events in Honor of Survivors of Torture and co-created the public ritual event “Iraq: Naming the Dead” at Saint Marks Church on the Bowery, during the Republican National Convention, 2004, and created the the docu-drama: “Iraq: Speaking of War,” produced at CUNY-Graduate Center and the Culture Project. Her edited books include: The Works by the Open Theater, Women in Theater: Compassion & Hope. She holds a certificate from the International Institute for Trauma Studies and an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She has taught at numerous colleges and universities and currently teaches memoir and fiction writing privately.