A writer/performer/director, Lisa D’Amour creates passionate, poetic theatre in a multiplicity of forms. Whether she’s writing a full-length play or making site-specific performance, there’s an obsession with the ephemeral, an inquiry toward scale and site, and in language fresh and strange. (She described one of her events as “a cross between a prophesy by an oracle, a corporate convention, and a Rockettes-style spectacle performed by men in business suits.”)

Performances are often structured by visual images; performers speak directly to audiences and use objects to tell the tale. Imagine D’Amour leading visitors through a large neutral office space into a tiny room cum rainforest with leafy ceiling, paper-bark walls, and mossy floor.

Committed to the “potential of truly collaborative creation, from the ground up,” she frequently works with artists of many disciplines, including long-time associates Katie Pearl, Kathy Randels, and Krista Kelley Walsh.

D’Amour sees laughter as a tool for participation and peppers her works with jokes and serious silliness. Yet, unafraid of darkness, she often writes about exile and loss. Her riff on the character of Stanley Kowalski—a solo created for her brother to perform—is as much about Brando, her family, and a broken New Orleans, as it is about the archetypal character.

www.lisadamour.com

Is it possible to experience true intimacy in the theater? To dissolve the boundaries of the individual, if only for a moment? I know I’ll never truly ‘connect’ with the unknowable ‘self’ of another person. But I’m going to try anyway. When I make performance, I like to march into the unknown.

 
 
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Born in St. Paul, MN, 1969
Lives in New Orleans, LA and Brooklyn, NY

Education
1996: M.F.A., Playwriting, University of Texas at Austin
1991: B.A. in Theater and English, Millsaps College, Jackson, MS

Selected Performances
2007 Bird Eye Blue Print. (Writer and Performer) Site-Specific Performance created with Katie Pearl for a vacant office space in the World Financial Center., NYC. Commissioned by Brookfield Properties.
2006 Hide Town . (Writer) Infernal Bridegroom Productions, Houston, TX, directed by Anthony Barilla.
2006 Stanley (2006). (Writer and Director) Solo performance created for Lisa’s brother Todd. HERE Arts Center, November, 2006, NYC.
2007 Tale of a West Texas Marsupial Girl. (Writer) A Musical for Children. Children’s Theater Company, dir. Whit Maclaughlin. Commissioned by Children’s Theater Company.
2004, '06 The Cataract. (Writer) Women’s Project, New York City, April 2006, directed by Katie Pearl. Perishable Theater / Theater of a Two-Headed Calf, Providence, RI, May, 2004, directed by Brooke O’Harra.
2005 LandMark: 24 Hours @ the Stone Arch Bridge. (Producer and Collaborating Artist) A 24-hour multidisciplinary performance designed for and performed on the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis. Created with Katie Pearl, Krista Kelley Walsh, Emily Johnson, Joel Pickard and Eleanor Savage.
2005 Nita and Zita. (Writer and Director) Created with performers Kathy Randels, Katie Pearl and jazz composer Tom Mc Dermott. Produced by ArtSpot Productions. 2005 Tour: Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), HERE Arts Center (NYC).
2002, '03, '05, '07 Anna Bella Eema. (Writer). Crowded Fire Theater, San Francisco, 2007. Gas and Electric Arts, Philadelphia, 2005. Ten Thousand Things, Minneapolis, 2002. New Georges, dir. Katie Pearl, NYC, 2003.
2004 Limo. (Writer and Director) Site-Specific in the Altria Lobby. New York, May, 2004. Created with and performed by Katie Pearl, objects by Krista Kelley Walsh. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Art.
2003 SLABBER. Solo performance installation, directed by Katie Pearl. Performed at venues in Austin, New Orleans, Chicago, New York and Providence.
2001-02 Red Death. Clubbed Thumb, NYC, Ohio Theater, May 2002, directed by Anne Kauffman; Red Eye Collaboration, Minneapolis, September 2001, directed by Steve Busa.
2001, '03 16 Spells to Charm the Beast. Salvage Vanguard Theater, Austin, February 2003, dir. Deanna Shoemaker; Clubbed Thumb @ HERE, NYC, June 2001 (workshop), directed by Anne Kauffman.
2000, '04 Cut Piece. Performed Yoko Ono’s CUT PIECE as part of the Y E S YOKO ONO exhibit. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2000. Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Germany,2004.
1998 Dress Me Blue/Window Me Sky. Solo performance installation created with Katie Pearl. Frontera@Hyde Park Theater, Austin, January 1998.

Selected Playwriting and Performance Awards
2006 NYSCA Commission for STANLEY (2006)
2005, '06 NEA/TCG Playwright’s Residency for work with Infernal Bridegroom Productions.
2004, '05 Rockfeller MAP grant for LandMARK
2003 Village Voice OBIE Award for Nita and Zita, written and directed by Lisa D’Amour.
2002-03, 1998-99 McKnight Advancement Grant from the Playwrights’ Center.
1999 MacDowell Colony Fellow, Peterborough, NH, September, 1999.
1999-2006 Member, New Dramatists, New York, NY
1997-98 Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Playwrights, The Playwrights’ Center

Publications
1999 Agitating the Theater of the Perfectly Harmless. Text of lecture given at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1999, published in Yale’s Theater Magazine, vol. 31, no. 2. Anna Bella Eema, My California, Frostbite, 16 Spells to Charm the Beast and Red Death published by Playscripts, Inc.

LIMO, SLABBER and Dress Me Blue published in Play, a Journal of Plays, #3.




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