Lisa D'Amour
Playwright and Interdisciplinary Artist

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, Children’s Theater Company (Minneapolis), Steppenwolf Theater Company (Chicago) 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.  She is the recipient of the 2008 Alpert Award for the Arts in theater and the 2011 Steinberg Playwright Award.   

PearlDamour is known for creating interdiscplinary, often site-specific works which range from the intimate to large scale.  These include How to Build a Forest, an 8-hour performance installation created with visual artist Shawn Hall (The Kitchen, New York, 2011)  Terrible Things, a dance theater work at PS122 in New York City in collaboration with choreographer Emily Johnson. 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), LIMO (commissioned by the Whitney Museum) performed in the large glass atrium of the Altria building in NYC (2004).  SLABBER was an itinerant solo performance for apartments, basements, lecture halls etc. performed in Austin, New Orleans, Chicago, Providence and New York. 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.

As a playwright, Lisa has received fellowships from the Jerome and McKnight Foundations, an independent artist commission from NYSCA (for Stanley 2006, created with her brother Todd D’Amour) and an NEA / TCG Playwrights’ Residency (to create HIDE TOWN with Infernal Bridegroom Productions).  With PearlDamour, she is a four- time recipient of project funding from the Rockefeller MAP Fund and a 2009 Creative Capital grantee.

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 and Brooklyn.

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Representation:
Antje Oegel
AO International
aoegel@aoegelinternational.com
(001) 773-754 7628 (phone)
(001) 773-910 5691 (cell)