Barbara Hammond is a New York playwright, filmmaker and songwriter. She is a New Dramatists resident playwright (Class of 2018) and is currently under commission from both the Royal Court Theatre and the Contemporary American Theatre Festival. Awards and recognitions: 2014 Seven Devils Theatre Conference; the 2012 Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright Award; 2010-2014 Yale Playwrights Festival mentor; a 2011 Edward Albee Foundation Fellow; a Tyrone Guthrie Centre repeat resident in Annaghmakerrig; finalist at the Tennessee Williams One-Act Play Festival and the Kerouac Project; Special Jury Award, First Irish 2009 Theatre Festival. She is a member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild, and was named one of the Influential Women of 2011 by the Irish Voice. Playlist: Visible from Four States; The Eva Trilogy: Eva the Chaste, Enter the Roar, No Coast Road; Beyond the Pale; Summerland; Norman and Beatrice; Paper Tigers and a collection of three one-acts entitled New York in June.
For more information: http://www.barbarahammond.com/
Barbara Hammond will be on Duke's campus for a two-week residency in February to workshop and further develop her work-in-progress We Are Pussy Riot. Hammond will be working closely with the students of Professor Jody McAuliffe's advanced acting class, as well as professional actor Liba Vaynberg who will be joining the group for the second week. At the close of the residency, the Duke community will have the opportunity to see a staged reading of this challenging new work, February 25 and 26 in Sheafer Theater.
In an interview with theater blogger Adam Szymkkowicz, Hammond explains: " I started writing the play because I was compelled to understand why the girls in Pussy Riot did what they did in the Cathedral, and questions of church and state are always on my radar, but as I began to research what has been happening in Russia, especially since 2012, and the slide into what they call “the power vertical” -- the scope of the play exploded. Last autumn I went to Moscow to talk to as many people as I could and absorb as much as I could about Russian culture and, this past week I went to Kiev, Ukraine, a country at war, to meet with theatres about a translation and production of WE ARE PUSSY RIOT there." http://aszym.blogspot.com/2015/04/i-interview-playwrights-part-735.html
Theater Studies