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SPARC Appoints Jami Brandli as the 2020 Playwright-in-Residence for New Voices for the Theater

Jami Brandli, an award-winning theatre artist will serve as playwright-in-residence for New Voices for the Theater, a playwriting competition and workshop open to high school students in the Commonwealth.

As playwright-in-residence for New Voices, Brandli will guide eight high school students from all over the state of Virginia in a workshop-residency. She will teach them about the art of playwriting and guide them through the revision process of their original one-act plays each of them submitted. Brandli herself selected the eight winners out of 174 submissions based on the merits of their respective plays.

Brandli’s plays include Technicolor Life, S.O.E., M-Theory, ¡SOLDADERA!, Sisters Three, Through the Eye of a Needle, Medusa’s Song, O: A Rhapsody in Divorce, and BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!) which was named in the 2014 Kilroys List.

Her work has been produced/developed at New Dramatists,  New York Theatre Workshop, Launch Pad, The Women’s Voices Theater Festival, Chalk REP, Great Plains Theatre Conference, The Lark, among other venues.

Winner of John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award, Holland New Voices Award, Ashland New Plays Festival and Aurora Theatre Company’s GAP Prize.  Finalist for the 2016 PEN Literary Award for Drama, Playwrights’ Center Core Writer Fellowship, Princess Grace Award and the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference; nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.  Her short works are published with TCG and Smith & Kraus.

Technicolor Life premiered as part of the 2015 Women’s Voices Theater Festival and received its Australian premiere in 2017. In 2018, BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!) received a joint-world premiere with Moxie Theatre (San Diego) and Promethean Theatre (Chicago), ending with Moving Arts’ production at Atwater Village Theatre in Los Angeles (LA Times Critic’s Choice and Ovation Recommended). BLISS will receive it’s next production at Defunkt Theatre (Portland, OR) in early 2020. Through the Eye of a Needle (Stage Raw ‘TOP TEN’ Pick and Ovation Recommended) received its world premiere at The Road Theatre (Los Angeles), March-May 2018.  Sisters Three received its world premiere with The Inkwell Theater (Los Angeles) in December through January 2019.  As a 2019 Humanitas Prize PLAY LA playwright, Jami was commissioned to write her latest play, Visiting Hours. She is currently a member of the 2019/2020 Under Construction playwright cohort at The Road Theatre.

A proud member of The Playwrights Union, the Antaeus Playwrights Lab, and The Dramatist Guild, Jami teaches dramatic writing at Lesley University’s low-residency MFA program. She is represented by Robert A Freedman Agency and MSW Media Management.

For more info:www.jamibrandli.com