Sibyl Kempson

Sibyl Kempson lives and makes theater plays in NYC and the Pocono Mountains. Her plays have been presented at Dixon Place, Soho Rep, Performance Space 122, Little Theater, Brick Theater, the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX, the Great Plains Theater Conference in Omaha, and Theater Bonn in Germany, and have been developed in workshops in the CATCH! Performance Series, Little Theater, and at New Dramatists. She is a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow, a member of New Dramatists class of ‘17, a four-time recipient of Dixon Place’s Mondo Cane! Commission (2002, '07, '09, '11), and of individual grant support from the Greenwall Foundation 2009 & 2010. She is a founding member of the Joyce Cho Initiative, an affinity of playwrights dedicated to the staging of problem plays, and of Machiqq Women's Auxiliary playwriting group. She earned an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College, 2007, where she studied under the instigation of Mac Wellman. Her plays are published by the 53rd State Press (Crime or Emergency, in Joyce Cho Plays, Zeit af der KürbisGeistNachten, and a new double volume with Ich KürbisGeist & The Secret Death of Puppets); PLAY Journal of Plays (Potatoes of August); and the Brooklyn Review (excerpts of Crime and The Secret Death of Puppets).

Current, recent, and upcoming projects include: Big Dance Theater’s production of her play Ich KürbisGeist at the Chocolate Factory this October 2012; a commission for a new work in collaboration with Elevator Repair Service called Fondly, Collette Richland to premiere at New York Theater Workshop in 2014; a New Dramatists/Full Stage USA commission for a new work in collaboration with Austin, TX groups Rude Mechs, Salvage Vanguard, Physical Plant, and Rubber Rep, called River of Gruel, Pile of Pigs: The Requisite Gestures of Narrow Approach to premiere at the Fusebox Festival in 2014; Restless Eye, a collaboration with David Neumann’s Advanced Beginner Group which premiered at New York Live Arts in March 2012 and will see publication in the Fall 2012 issue of PAJ; and a commission from the Playwrights’ Division of New York City Players to premiere at Abrons Arts Center in 2014.

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