Writers' Biographies*
LAURA MARIA CENSABELLA's plays have been produced or workshopped by The Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, The Women's Project & Productions, The Working Theatre, Interact Theatre in L.A., the American Living Room Series at The Ohio, the AthenaWorks Marathon, the Belmont Italian American Playhouse (which commissioned her play Some Girls), the Pacific Resident Theatre, The Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, and Ensemble Studio Theatre, where she is a member and runs the professional Playwrights Unit. She has been awarded three grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts: two in playwriting for Abandoned in Queens and Carla Cooks The War (formerly titled Three Italian Women), and The Geri Ashur Award in Screenwriting for her original screenplay Truly Mary. Truly Mary was developed at The New Harmony Project with Angelo Pizzo and Michael London. She has also been a two-time participant in the O'Neill Playwrights Conference for Abandoned in Queens and Jazz Wives Jazz Lives and has received writing fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The New Harmony Project and the O'Neill. Her short play Posing was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and The Actual Footage won the Tennessee Chapbook Prize for Drama. Both plays are published in Poems & Plays (Numbers Five and Seven). Ms. Censabella's teaching experience includes the New School for Drama, Sarah Lawrence College, the Actors Studio Drama School, Columbia University's School of the Arts, Columbia College's Undergraduate Writing Program, City University's MFA Writing Program, The Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. She has written the short film adaptation Physics for HBO's Women: Breaking the Rules series, and for two years she wrote for daytime television, winning two Emmy Awards. Her half-hour independent film Last Call (directed by Robert Bailey and starring Jude Ciccolella) has screened in festivals throughout the world, including the Avignon Film Festival, the Other Venice Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives' New Works Series, and the Breckenridge Film Festival where it won the Best Short Drama Award. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America, East.
CRAIG LUCAS’ plays include Missing Persons, Blue Window, Reckless, God’s Heart, The Dying Gaul, Stranger, Small Tragedy, Prayer For My Enemy and The Singing Forest. He wrote the book for The Light In The Piazza, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel; the musical play Three Postcards, music and lyrics by Craig Carnelia; the libretto for the opera Orpheus in Love, music by Gerald Busby; and he has recently completed the libretto for Two Boys, an opera with composer Nico Muhly, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and scheduled to premiere there in a co-production with the English National Opera. His new English adaptations include Brecht’s Galileo, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, and Strindberg’s Miss Julie. He is also an acclaimed screenwriter and director. He has won the L.A. Drama Critics Award, the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Award for Best American Play, the Hull-Warriner Award, the LAMBDA Literary Award, the Flora Roberts Award, the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Laura Pels/PEN Mid-Career Achievement Award and the Joan Cullman Award; he has twice won the Obie Award for Best Play (Prelude and Small Tragedy).
EMILY MANN is in her nineteenth season as Artistic Director of McCarter Theatre. Ms. Mann
wrote and directed Having Our Say, adapted from the book by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth
Delany with Amy Hill Hearth. The Broadway production was nominated for three Tony awards,
an Outer Critics and a Drama Desk award. Ms. Mann also wrote the teleplay for Having Our Say which received a Peabody Award, a Christopher Award and was a nomination for outstanding achievement in television and radio by the Writers Guild of America. Her other plays include Annulla, Meshugah, An Autobiography, Greensboro (A Requiem), Mrs. Packard and Execution of Justice.
She received an Obie Award for her direction of the New York run of Edward Albee’s All Over.
She received a Bay Area Theatre Critics Award, a Playwriting Award from the Women’s
Committee of the Dramatists Guild, a Burns Mantle Yearbook Best Play Citation, and a Drama
Desk nomination. Her play, Still Life, won six Obie Awards, including Distinguished Playwriting
and Distinguished Directing. A recipient of the prestigious Hull-Warriner Award and the
Edward Albee Last Frontier Directing Award, Ms. Mann is a member of the Dramatists Guild
and serves on its Council. She received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Princeton
University. A collection of her plays, Testimonies: Four Plays, has been published by Theatre
Communications Group, Inc.
MARSHA NORMAN was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Hull-
Warriner, and Drama Desk Awards for 'Night Mother; a Tony Award and Drama Desk Awards
for The Secret Garden; and the John Gassner Medallion, Newsday Oppenheimer award, and the
American Theatre Critics Association Citation for Getting Out. Other plays include Third and Oak,
The Laundromat, The Poolhall, The Holdup, Traveler in the Dark, Sarah and Abraham, Loving Daniel Boone, and Trudy Blue. She also wrote the book for The Color Purple, currently on Broadway.
Published work includes Four Plays and a novel, The Fortune Teller. Television and film credits
include Face of a Stranger, starring Gena Rowlands and Tyne Daley. Norman is co-chair, with
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Christopher Durang, of the Playwriting Department of the Juilliard School and vice president of
the Dramatists Guild of America.
*Participating authors subject to change. Schedule of events will be forthcoming.