Sibyl Kempson

Sibyl Kempson lives and makes theater plays in NYC and the Pocono Mountains. Plays include Crime or Emergency; Potatoes of August; So Much To Go Crazy (The Show Might Go On) (Sehr Langsam); The Wytche of Problymm Plantation; Bad Girls Good Writers ; Spargel Time! and many others. Her work has been developed in workshops at Dixon Place, Soho Rep, the CATCH! Performance Series, and Little Theater, as well as at New Dramatists, and has been presented at venues in NYC, Omaha, Austin, and Bonn, Germany. Current and upcoming projects include an as-yet untitled collaboration with Elevator Repair Service, 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, a collaboration with David Neumann’s Advanced Beginner Group, and a commission from the Playwrights’ Department of NYC Players in partnership with Abrons Arts Center. The 2011-12 season will see productions of her plays The Secret Death of Puppets (or) How Do Puppets Die? (or) Puppets Die In Secret (at Dixon Place) and Ich, KürbisGeist (workshopped by Big Dance Theater here at Prelude and next Fall ‘12 at the Chocolate Factory/PS 122). Her plays have been published by the 53rd State Press (Crime and Kürbis), PLAY Journal of Plays (Potatoes of August), the Brooklyn Review (excerpts of Crime and Secret Death of Pup- pets), and Midway Literary Journal (excerpt of The Secret Death of Puppets). She is a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow, 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. She is a founding member of the Joyce Cho Initia- tive, an affinity of playwrights dedicated to the staging of problem plays, and of Machiqq Women’s Auxiliary playwriting group. She has an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College, 2007, where she studied under the instigation of Mac Wellman.