Author Profile
Susan Russell
SUSAN RUSSELL is on the theatre faculty at Penn State University. She received her PhD in Theatre Studies and MA from Florida State University, and her BA in Theatre from St. Andrews Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, NC. Between education pursuits, she experienced a twenty-five year career as a professional actor on and off-Broadway, in regional theatre and at opera companies across the country.
While performing for five years in Phantom of the Opera, she was an artist/teacher for New York Offstage where she created, developed, and implemented workshops in musical theatre performance and acting, and created and developed arts-based education programs for New York City Opera. As a playwright, her works Olympia (1998) and Present Perfect (1999) have been produced by the Emerging Artist Theatre in New York City, in 2000, Lincoln Center selected Present Perfect for its Millennium Living Room Festival at the HERE Theatre in Soho.
Her play Severe Clear was a semi-finalist in the 2006 O’Neill Theatre Center Playwriting Competition and her 2009 play Ecoute: Pieces of Reynaldo Hahn toured 40 venues in the United States, starring PSU School of Theatre faculty member, Norman Spivey. At Penn State, Susan teaches graduate and undergraduate playwriting, musical theatre history, graduate literature and criticism, and Women and Theatre. In 2007, she created Cultural Conversations, which is a new visual, theatre, and dance festival devoted to promoting and fostering new works that circle themes of global and local diversity. She is editor of the academic journal Cultural Conversations: Works in Progress/Writers in the Making, which has its debut in February of 2011, and in 2010 she published Body Language: Cultural Conversations Reaching Out and Reaching In, which is a day-by-day template for school programs that uses playwriting, media, and public performance to explore social and cultural issues that affect elementary, middle, and high school girls.
PRESS:
Cultural Conversations 2011: Body Language-Stop the Violence, Start the Conversation
