Sibyl Kempson

Bio

Sibyl Kempson lives and makes theater plays in NYC and the Pocono Mountains. Her plays have been presented at Dixon Place, Soho Rep, Performance Space 122, The Chocolate Factory, New York Live Arts, the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, the Great Plains Theater Conference in Omaha, and Theater Bonn in Germany, and have been developed in workshops in the CATCH! Performance Series, Little Theater, and at New Dramatists. She is a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow, a member of New Dramatists class of ‘17, a 2013-14 McKnight National Resident and Commissionee, 2013-14 recipient of the Virginia B. Toulmin commission through New York Theatre Workshop, and a four-time recipient of Dixon Place’s Mondo Cane! Commission (2002, '07, '09, '11). She is a founding member of the Joyce Cho Initiative, an affinity of playwrights dedicated to the staging of problem plays, and of Machiqq Women's Auxiliary playwriting group. She earned an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College, 2007, where she studied under the instigation of Mac Wellman. Her plays are published by the 53rd State Press (Crime or Emergency, in Joyce Cho Plays, Zeit af der KürbisGeistNachten, and a double volume with Ich KürbisGeist & The Secret Death of Puppets); PLAY Journal of Plays (Potatoes of August); and PAJ (Restless Eye, a collaboration with David Neumann and Advanced Beginner Group).

Engagement Information

Playwright Sibyl Kempson came to Duke for a two-week residency to work on her new play, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag. The play was commissioned by New York City Players. Kempson was at Duke as part of the Theater Previews New Works Lab, and her residency culminated in a reading of the play.

Participants in the reading included both undergraduate and graduate Duke students and a member of the community. The readings took place September 27 and 28 in Sheafer Theater in the Bryan Center.