About Lisa

Lisa D’Amour is a playwright, educator and interdisciplinary alchemist from New Orleans, Louisiana. She came up in a world of ritual, activism, group spectacle and care, all of which continue to thrive in her work. Lisa's plays have produced at theaters across the globe, including MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway, Playwrights’ Horizons (NYC), Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago), Children’s Theater Company (Minneapolis), The National Theater (London), Woolly Mammoth Theater (Washington D.C.), Catastrophic Theater (Houston) and ArtSpot Productions (New Orleans). Her play Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn prize.

Lisa is Co-Artistic Director of PearlDamour with Katie Pearl - a company that conjures interdisciplinary experiences that range from intimate to large scale. Recent work includes Ocean Filibuster, a genre-crashing human-ocean showdown (currently touring), MILTON, a spoken and sung homage to five small towns named Milton performed in town libraries, churches and high school auditoriums, and How to Build a Forest, in which an elaborate, fabric forest is assembled on stage over 6.5 hours, exists for 30 minutes and is disassembled in 1 hour (created with visual artist Shawn Hall). 

As a community instigator, Lisa catalyzes ideas, gatherings and artivist actions. In New Orleans, she has co-organized arts and climate convenings, co-produced the yearly Trinity City Artivist Awards and mentored/learned from youth as they created the multi-issue Trinity City Comics. She is currently nurturing Climate Sing, a multi-year project that will commission 12 new a capella songs about planet earth.

Lisa has been awarded a 2015 Lilly Award, a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the 2011 Steinberg Playwright Award, the 2008 Alpert Award for the Arts in theater, 2 OBIE Awards and fellowships from the Jerome and McKnight Foundations. She received an MFA in Playwriting from UT Austin, and a BA in Theater/English from Millsaps College in Jackson, MS.