Melia Bensussen. (Picture by the Defining Studios.)
WATERFORD, CONN.: The Eugene O’Neill Theater Heart has named Melia Bensussen the creative director of the Nationwide Playwrights Convention. Bensussen was this system’s visitor creative director final summer season.
“I couldn’t be extra thrilled to have Melia be part of us because the Creative Director of the Nationwide Playwrights Convention, our foundational program,” Tom Viertel, the chairman of the O’Neill’s board of trustees, mentioned in a press release. “Her occasions with us as a director and because the visitor creative director final summer season have at all times been joyous, sensible, and totally productive. As we come again from the big challenges of the previous couple of years, I can’t think about anybody I’d slightly have main this very important program.”
Bensussen at present serves because the creative director of Hartford Stage and can serve in each roles concurrently. She was named creative director of Hartford Stage in 2019 and has additionally directed productions on the Huntington Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Baltimore Heart Stage, the Oregon Shakespeare Pageant, the Humana Pageant, Playwrights Horizons, Cincinnati Playhouse, and lots of extra corporations throughout the nation. She was nominated for a Barrymore Award for guiding Hearts at Folks’s Gentle in 2000 and gained a 1999 Obie Award for guiding Flip of the Screw at Main Levels. She has additionally gained two Princess Grace Awards for guiding, together with the Statue Award for Sustained Excellence in Directing.
Bensussen is a graduate of Brown College and served because the chair of the performing arts division at Emerson School for over a decade. She is a member of the humanities advisory council of the Princess Grace Basis. A local of Mexico Metropolis, Bensussen translated Langston Hughes’ English translation of Federico García Lorca’s Blood Marriage ceremony again into Spanish for publication by Theatre Communications Group. Her essay on Shakespeare’s The Service provider of Venice is featured within the anthology Jews, Theatre, and Efficiency in an Intercultural Context, printed by Brill Publishing.
“I’m grateful to the O’Neill for entrusting me with such an necessary cost in main the Nationwide Playwrights Convention,” Bensussen mentioned in a press release. “We’re at a pivotal second in our trade, and the galvanizing energy of NPC will likely be terribly necessary in elevating new and rising writers and to rising the sphere by way of their work. This program is deeply important to the way forward for the American Theatre, and I’m honored to steward it by way of its subsequent iteration.”
The Nationwide Playwrights Convention has been the gold normal of new-play growth since 1964, and can rejoice its sixtieth anniversary this summer season. Benussen succeeds Wendy C. Goldberg, who stepped down in 2022 after 18 years as creative director.
The Eugene O’Neill Theater Heart is the nation’s preeminent group devoted to the event of latest works and new voices for the American theatre. It has been residence to over 1,000 new stage works and rising artists and runs the Nationwide Critics Institute, the Nationwide Music Theater Convention, the Nationwide Puppetry Convention, and different packages.
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