Lisa D'Amour

Bio

Lisa D’Amour is a playwright and interdisciplinary artist.  She is one half of the OBIE-Award winning performance duo PearlDamour, whose work has been presented by HERE Arts Center, PS122, The Whitney Museum of Art, the Walker Arts Center and the FuseBox Festival.  Her plays have been commissioned and produced by theaters across the country, including The Women’s Project, Playwrights’ Horizons, Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, Clubbed Thumb, (all in NYC), Children’s Theater Company (Minneapolis), Steppenwolf Theater Company (Chicago) The Wilma Theater (Philadelphia), Woolly Mammoth Theater (Washington D.C.) and the Royal National Theater (London). Lisa’s play Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn prize.  In the 2015-16 season, her play Airline Highway will be produced at Steppenwolf, directed by Joe Mantello, and then transfer to Manhattan Theater Club’s Broadway stage.  She is the recipient of the 2008 Alpert Award for the Arts in theater, the 2011 Steinberg Playwright Award and the 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award.

PearlDamour is known for creating interdiscplinary, often site-specific works which range from the intimate to large scale.  Currently they are working on MILTON, a performance created from interviews in and visits two five towns in the United States named Milton.  Past work includes How to Build a Forest, an 8-hour performance installation created with visual artist Shawn Hall (The Kitchen, New York, 2011, currently touring), Terrible Things, a dance theater work at PS122 in New York City in collaboration with choreographer Emily Johnson and Bird Eye Blue Print, a performance/tour through a vacant office suite in the World Financial Center across from ground zero in New York City (2007)  In 2005, they created LandMARK, a 24-hour continuous system of interlocking performances designed for the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.  This public art work, created with Katie Pearl and five artists of different disciplines, included performance-tours, dance pieces, installations, spectacle-processions and instruction performances that allowed audiences to participate.  From 2002-2005, they created and toured Nita & Zita, a performance about two showgirls from Hungary living in New Orleans, performed by Katie with Kathy Randels, with Lisa directing.  Lisa, Katie and Kathy each received a Village Voice OBIE Award for Nita & Zita.

In 2008, Lisa wrote and directed a performance for visual artist SWOON’s Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, a flotilla of six boats created from salvaged materials that navigated the Hudson River in August 2009, performing in riverfront parks from Troy, NY to New York City.

Lisa received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin.  She is a core member of the Playwrights’ Center and a recent alumna of New Dramatists.  She lives with her husband, Brendan Connelly, in New Orleans.

Engagement Information

Teaching about collaborative created theater