Sibyl Kempson

Sibyl Kempson’s plays have been presented in the United States, Germany, and Norway. Her work has received support from the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Dixon Place (four Mondo Cane! Commissions from 2002-11 for The Wytche of Problymm Plantation, Crime or Emergency, Potatoes of August, and The Secret Death of Puppets ), a MAP Fund grant for her collaboration with Elevator Repair Service Fondly, Collette Richland (at New York Theatre Workshop), a USA Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, with NYTW and director Sarah Benson a Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Commission for Kyckling and Screaming (a translation/adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck), a McKnight National Residency and Commission for a new play The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S., a New Dramatists/Full Stage USA commission for a devised piece entitled From the Pig Pile: The Requisite Gesture(s) of Narrow Approach with Austin-based companies Rude Mechs and Salvage Vanguard Theater, and National Presenters Network Creation Fund and Forth Fund Awards for the same project. Her second collaboration with David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group, I Understand Everything Better, received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production in 2015. The first was Restless Eye at New York Live Arts in 2012. Upcoming projects include a new in-ear opera with David Lang for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston for 2018, to be performed by vocal group Roomful of Teeth and pianist Stephen Drury, and The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. / Sasquatch Rituals at New York Live Arts/Abrons respectively in 2017. Kempson launched the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. (www.7daughtersofeve.com) in April 2015 at the Segal Center at the City University of New York. The company’s inaugural production, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in NYC. In October, a new piece Public People's Enemy was presented at the Ibsen Awards and Conference in Ibsen’s hometown of Skien, Norway. 12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens, a 3-year cycle of rituals for the new Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking District of NYC, began on the Vernal Equinox in March 2016, and will recur on all Solstices and Equinoxes through 2018.
She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a member of New Dramatists, a USA Artists Rockefeller Fellow, an Artist-in-Residence at the Abrons Arts Center, a 2014 nominee for the Doris Duke Impact Award, the Laurents Hatcher Award and the Herb Alpert Award, and a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect. Her plays are published by 53rd State Press, PLAY: Journal of Plays, and Performance & Art Journal (PAJ). MFA Brooklyn College under the instigation of Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. She teaches and has taught experimental playwriting at Sarah Lawrence College, Brooklyn College, and the Eugene Lang College at the New School in NYC.

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