Artist Talk: Sibyl Kempson

SIBYL KEMPSON

Sibyl Kempson

 

Sibyl Kempson’s plays have been presented in the United States, Germany, and Norway.

She launched the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr & Perf Co in 2015. Productions include Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag (Abrons Arts Center, NYC), Public People’s Enemy, an adaptation of Enemy of the People, (Ibsen Awards and Conference in Ibsen’s hometown of Skien, Norway), Sasquatch Rituals (The Kitchen, NYC) and 12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens, a 3-year cycle of rituals for the new Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking District of NYC, begun on the Vernal Equinox in March 2016, recurring on every Solstice and Equinox through December 2018.

Other current projects include true pearl, a new opera with David Lang for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston premiering in October 2018 and The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. premiering in NYC in 2019.

Kempson is the recipient of a 2018 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for American Playwright at Mid-Career. She is also a 2014 USA Artists Rockefeller Fellow and a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow. She received four Mondo Cane! commissions from Dixon Place between 2002-11. I Understand Everything Better, with David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group, received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production in 2015, the same year her play Fondly, Collette Richland, penned for Elevator Repair Service, premiered at New York Theatre Workshop.

Her plays are published by 53rd State Press, PLAY: Journal of Plays, and Performance & Art Journal (PAJ). MFA Brooklyn College under the instigation of Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. She teaches and has taught experimental performance writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Brooklyn College, Victoria College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne, and the Eugene Lang College at the New School in NYC.

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