Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks Becomes Tisch Visiting Professor

By Richard Pierce

The Tisch School of the Arts (TSOA) recently announced that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has joined the faculty as a visiting arts professor in the Rita and Burton Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing. Parks’s three-year appointment, effective Nov. 1, is in conjunction with her new position in the master writer chair at the Public Theater for the same period, and represents an innovative new arrangement between academia and the non-profit theater world.
    Beginning fall 2009, Parks will teach one undergraduate playwriting course a semester in the Department of Dramatic Writing and will take part in a series of colloquia, lectures, and presentations being planned at TSOA for the 2009 spring semester. Her faculty appointment has been made possible by funding from the Public Theater through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that supports playwriting organizations and theatres.
    “The support of playwrights and the development of new plays are crucial to the vibrancy of the American theatre, and we are proud to be in the forefront of this effort with our unique collaboration,” said Tisch Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell.
    The Public Theater’s new master writer chair provides an artistic home and support for established playwrights whose work has set the standard for the highest level of achievement in the theater. It is a full-salaried position that affords the writer the flexibility and freedom to pursue his or her artistic goals and endeavors.
    A playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, Parks became the first black woman playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her Broadway hit Topdog/Underdog (2002). Among her many honors is a MacArthur “Genius” Award.
    In 2007, her project 365Days/ 365Plays was produced in over 700 theaters worldwide, creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history. Her plays include In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Venus (1996 OBIE Award), The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 OBIE Award for Best New American Play), and The America Play.
    In 1990, she wrote and directed her first film, Anemone Me, and went on to write the Spike Lee film Girl 6. Parks recently co-authored the film The Great Debaters, starring Denzel Washington, and adapted Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, which starred Halle Barry and premiered on ABC’s Oprah Winfrey Presents. She wrote her first novel, Getting Mother’s Body, in 2003 and recently starred in The Making of Plus One, a “mockumentary” taking place during the Cannes Film Festival to be released in 2009.  
    Parks has taught or worked as writer in residence at numerous institutions, including the California Institute of the Arts and Yale School of Drama, among others. She holds an honorary doctorate from Brown University and earned her B.A. (cum laude) from Mount Holyoke College.

Suzan-Lori Parks
Photo by Stephanie Diani