Catherine Filloux | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Tisch School of the Arts at New York University |
Occupation | Playwright |
Catherine Filloux is an American playwright. Filloux's plays have confronted the issue of human rights in many nations. She is of French and Algeria descent. She lives in New York City, New York. [1]
Filloux's mother is from Oran, Algeria and her father from Guéret, France. Of her parents, Filloux says, "My dad was born in the center of France, and he became an adventurer," who sailed from France to New York in a catamaran. [2] "My mom was a very literate person who loved literature" and wrote poetry in both French and English. As a child, Filloux moved with her family to San Diego, where she grew up. [2] She says, "We grew up... in this kind of schism of Algeria, France, and San Diego. So it made for a background of not really knowing where one belongs..." [2]
Filloux received her MFA in dramatic writing from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU) and her French baccalaureate with honors in Toulon, France.
Filloux's plays have confronted the issue of human rights in many nations. She was first drawn to the subject upon reading of the psychosomatic blindness suffered by a group of Cambodian women after witnessing the massacres of the Khmer Rouge, a story that formed the basis of her 2004 play Eyes of the Heart. She worked with survivors of the Cambodian genocide, developing the oral history project A Circle of Grace with the Cambodian Women's Group at St. Rita's Centre for Immigration and Refugee Services in the Bronx, New York.
Her 2005 play Lemkin's House is based on the life of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew and American immigrant lawyer who invented the word genocide in 1944 and spent his life striving to have it recognized as an international crime.
In her 2010 play, Dog and Wolf, a U.S. asylum lawyer seeks to win asylum for Jasmina, a Bosnian refugee. Filloux says of her play, "[It] is written in the staggered poetry of the effort to connect and articulate," grappling with themes of identity, law, sexuality, and family. [3]
Filloux states "For a while, these crimes were the 'best-kept secrets,' but they're not even secrets. They happen all the time, and nobody cares. And that's the problem on some level with doing this kind of theater. There's just a little wall that's been built up against these things, and to write theater about them is part of the challenge." [4]
Throughout her career, Filloux has constantly sought new ways to tell stories and engage audiences such as with opera. In 2022, Filloux participated in a talk with Keturah Stickann as part of Words First: Talking Text in Opera. During the conversation, titled “Catherine Filloux and Writing Social Justice,” Filloux discussed the artistic process, particularly in the realm of opera and her work on the libretto of Orlando with Olga Neuwirth, describing the "sublime" aspect of seeing the music of an opera carry the words of a text. [5]
In a 2008 interview in The Brooklyn Rail , Filloux stated: "For twenty years I have written about Cambodia, P.T.S.D., genocide and trauma. People have exposed their pain to me. I have tried to understand how such violence can occur, how people can so bravely survive, and I felt the raw need to be honest about myself. ... To hold two opposing things in your hands at the same time and to balance them: I'm in that passage, trying to be Here and There. Last time I went to Cambodia, I felt for the first time I could be in two places at the same time, and not compare. That came from writing this play Killing the Boss." [6]
Catherine’s musical “Welcome to the Big Dipper” premieres Off-Broadway in 2024 at the York Theatre in New York City; it is a National Alliance for Musical Theatre finalist and received a workshop at the Redhouse Arts Center in Syracuse, NY (Hunter Foster, AD). [7]
Catherine Filloux was a recipient of the 2024 LMCC Manhattan Arts Grants in New York, recognizing her contributions to the arts. [8]
Her play WHITE SAVIOR was nominated for the inaugural 2023-25 Venturous List, an honor chosen by nationally prominent playwrights for the Venturous Theater Fund. The play was also part of the 2023 Theater555 Reading Series, produced by the Masterworks Theater Company, with Ylfa Edelstein and Dan Lauria serving as Artistic Directors. [9] [10]
Filloux's play THIRTY-FIVE, featuring illustrations by Luba Lukova, was published in the December/January 2023/24 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. She contributed to the "On Art and Activism" discussion alongside other noted playwrights such as Johnson, Bayeza, and Deen in The Dramatist's May/June 2023 issue. [11]
In 2023, Next Stage Press published three of her plays: BEAUTY INSIDE, DOG AND WOLF, and KIDNAP ROAD. Her nonfiction essay The Wild Child appeared in Writing Disorder in Spring 2022. [12] Additionally, she authored the chapter “Calls to Action: Collaboration across Difference” in the 2024 Routledge publication Theatre Responds to Social Trauma: Chasing the Demons. Beyond the stage, Filloux has developed five films for the Reimagining Myself transition prison reentry program with Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA). [13]
She also serves as the board president of CultureHub.org, an organization dedicated to art and technology collaboration. [14]
(Librettist)
(Librettist)
Erik Ehn is an American playwright and director known for proposing the Regional Alternative Theatre movement. The former dean of theater at CalArts, the California Institute of Arts, he is the former head of playwriting and professor of theatre and performance studies at Brown University. His published works include The Saint Plays, Beginner, and 13 Christs.
Sarah Ruhl is an American playwright, poet, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Eurydice (2003), The Clean House (2004), and In the Next Room (2009). She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Two of her plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play. In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Recording at the 2023 Grammy Awards.
Jimmy Roberts is an American composer for the musical theater as well as a pianist and entertainer. His musical scores include: I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change (1996) and The Thing About Men (2003), both with book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro. He is a 1977 graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with the noted pianist, Constance Keene.
Sheila Callaghan is a playwright and screenwriter who emerged from the RAT movement of the 1990s. She has been profiled by American Theater Magazine, "The Brooklyn Rail", Theatermania, and The Village Voice. Her work has been published in American Theatre magazine.
William Harper is a Chicago photographer and composer. His photography is concerned with natural form and line and his music is theatrical, technology-based work sourced from liturgical and folk traditions. Harper first earned critical acclaim for his work defining a Chicago style of new music theater and opera as the creator and producer of many full-length original works for the American Ritual Theater Company (ARTCO). Concurrent with these projects, and subsequently, Harper's opera, music theater, dance, orchestra, chorus, and electro-acoustic works have been commissioned and performed by companies including The Minnesota Opera Company, The New Music Theater Ensemble of Minneapolis, INTAR Hispanic American Cultural Center, The Goodman Theater, Hartford Stage and The Music Theatre Group. Harper's recently completed Unquiet Myths, a suite of electro-acoustic pieces was commissioned by The Ellen Sinopoli Dance Company for Spill Out!, which premiered in 2006 and is scheduled to begin a national tour this year. William Harper received a PhD in music composition from the Eastman School of Music, and has received support from many foundations including the National Institute for Music Theater, the Djerassi Foundation, the Yaddo Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois and New York State Arts Councils and The MacArthur Foundation.
Eduardo Oscar Machado is a Cuban playwright living in the United States. Notable plays by Machado include Broken Eggs, Havana is Waiting and The Cook. Many of his plays are autobiographical or deal with Cuba in some way. Machado teaches playwriting at New York University. He has served as the artistic director of the INTAR Theatre in New York City since 2004. He is openly gay.
Royce Vavrek is a Canadian-born Brooklyn-based librettist, playwright, dance scenarist, musical theatre writer and filmmaker known for his collaborations with composers David T. Little, Missy Mazzoli, Mikael Karlsson, Ricky Ian Gordon, Paola Prestini and Du Yun, soprano Lauren Worsham, producers Beth Morrison and Lawrence Edelson, and conductors Steven Osgood, Julian Wachner and Alan Pierson.
Lisa Loomer is an American playwright and screenwriter who has also worked as an actress and stand-up comic. She is best known for her play The Waiting Room (1994), in which three women from different time periods meet in a modern doctor's waiting room, each suffering from the effects of their various societies' cosmetic body modification practices. She also co-wrote the screenplay for the film Girl, Interrupted. Many of her plays deal with the experiences of Latinas and immigrant characters. Others deal with social and political issues through the lens of contemporary family life. Beyond that, Loomer's play The Waiting Room discusses issues such as body image, breast cancer, and non-Western medicine.
Ana María Simo is a New York playwright, essayist and novelist. Born in Cuba, educated in France, and writing in English, she has collaborated with such experimental artists as composer Zeena Parkins, choreographer Stephanie Skura and filmmakers Ela Troyano and Abigail Child.
David Adjmi is an American playwright. He is the recipient of a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award, a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the inaugural Steinberg Playwright Award, a Bush Artists Fellowship, and the Kesselring Prize for Drama. In 2020, he released a memoir about the struggle to become an artist, titled Lot Six. His plays include Stunning (2008) and Stereophonic (2023), the latter winning the Tony Award for Best Play.
The Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF) is an American annual professional theatre festival held at Shepherd University, located in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. According to the New York Times (in 2015), it is one of "50 essential summer festivals". In 2016, Germany's World Guide identified the festival as one of the "Top 10 theatre festivals not to miss this summer". A representative of the Theatre Communications Group in its publication American Theatre stated that "(CATF's) forward focus has helped ... change the American theatre conversation, bringing new voices and pressing topics to the stage ..."
Cristian Amigo is an American composer, improviser, guitarist, sound designer, and ethnomusicologist. His compositional and performing output includes blues and soul, music for the theater, chamber and orchestral music, opera, avant-jazz and rock music, and art/pop song. He has also recorded solo albums on the innova, Deep Ecology and BA labels. Amigo earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from UCLA where he focused on the music of Chile, Peru, and Argentina, as well as anthropological theory, critical studies, and intercultural aesthetics. While in graduate school, he was second guitarist to the Peruvian Afro-Criollo guitarist Carlos Hayre, with whom he played in concerts and festivals including the World Festival of Sacred Music. He is currently composer-in-residence at INTAR Theater in New York City and Music/Design/Production Faculty @ CalArts School of Theater Department of Experience Design and Production in Valencia, California.
Deborah Brevoort is an American playwright, librettist and lyricist best known for her play The Women of Lockerbie. She teaches creative writing at several universities.
INTAR Theatre, founded in 1966, is one of the oldest Hispanic theater companies in the United States. The INTAR acronym is for International Arts Relations.
Migdalia Cruz is a writer of plays, musical theatre and opera in the U.S. and has been translated into Spanish, French, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish.
Sara Cooper is a New York-based playwright-lyricist and librettist.
Michael John Garcés is a Cuban-American playwright and director. He is the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles. He has received several awards and grants, including the Alan Schneider Director Award and the Princess Grace Fellowship.
Andrea Thome is a Chilean and Costa Rican playwright born in Madison, Wisconsin. Her plays have been performed at venues all over the United States, and she is founder and co-director of the Fulana media project.
Luke Leonard is an American theatre director, designer, actor, playwright, and filmmaker whose work has been described as "outstanding" by The New York Times and "sophisticated and thought-provoking" by Limelight Magazine. He is the Founding Artistic Director of Monk Parrots, a New York City-based not-for-profit that produces new theatre, music theatre, and opera.
Carmen Rivera is an American playwright, teacher, and producer. Working for over 20 years in the arts, she is best known for her play La Gringa (1996) and the musical Celia: The Life and Music of Celia Cruz (2007), which she co-wrote with playwright and husband Cándido Tirado.