Saviana Stănescu

Saviana Stănescu, Romania) is a Romanian-American award-winning playwright, ARTivist, and poet based in New York/Ithaca. Hailed as one of the most exciting voices to have emerged in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Saviana has received numerous accolades for her work, including the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Script (Waxing West) and the Best Romanian Play of the Year UNITER Award (Inflatable Apocalypse) . She has been inducted into the Indie Theater Hall of Fame and was named the Indie Theater Person of the Year in 2010.

After protesting in the streets as a student at the Romanian Revolution in 1989, Saviana worked in the newly created Free Press as a cultural journalist at the daily newspaper Adevarul, a contributor to Raido Free Europe, and a talk-show host for TVR International (Necessary Polemics) . Her revolutionary spirit inspires all her theatrical and literary work.

Saviana's cutting-edge plays have been developed/produced at Women's Project, La MaMa, 59E59, New York Theatre Workshop, EST, HERE, New Georges, Lark, Cherry, Civic Ensemble, Teatro La Capilla, and Teatrul Odeon, just to name a few. She has also served as the NYSCA playwright-in-residence for Women's Project, writer-in-residence of East Coast Artists, and Director of International Exchange for The Lark Play Development Center (TCG New Generations / New Leaders Fellow) in New York. Her US plays include Aliens with Extraordinary Skills, Ants, White Embers (all published by Samuel French), Useless, Toys, For a Barbarian Woman, Lenin's Shoe, Waxing West, What Happens Next, Bee Trapped Inside a Window, and Zebra 2.0.

As a Fulbright fellow, she studied at NYU Tisch – receiving her MA in Performance Studies and an MFA in Dramatic Writing. Her PhD is in Theatre from the National University for Theatre&Film (UNATC) in Bucharest, Romania. Dr. Stănescu is also a celebrated professor and has taught Playwriting and Contemporary Theatre/Drama at NYU Tisch (2004-2012), Strasberg Institute for Theatre&Film, ESPa Primary Stages, and Fordham University. Currently, she works as a tenured Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at Ithaca College.

Early Life

Born in Bucharest and raised in Curtea de Arges, first capital of Walachia, and Pitesti, an industrial town, in Romania, Saviana spent her formative years under Ceausescu's dictatorship. She recalls in an interview having "rations of food and electricity, four hours of hot water per week, and two hours of TV programming per day, most of it filled with Ceausescu's speeches."

Her mother, Mariana Stănescu (nee Dima) is Aromanian and her father, Cornel Stănescu, track and field athlete and coach, is probably of Romani descent.

She was married to Alexandru Condeescu, director of the National Museum of Literature, Bucharest and father of Ada Condeescu, a Romanian actress, and Filip Condeescu.

Poetry and plays

• Useless
• Organic
• Viza de Clown
• The Fall
• Ants
• Polanski Polanski
• For a Barbarian Woman
• Aliens with Extraordinary Skills - A play, world premiere 2008 at the Women's Project
• Waxing West - a play, 2007 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Full-Length Script
• "Google Me!" - poetry in English
• Black Milk - An English-Romanian anthology of 4 plays
• The Inflatable Apocalypse - A play which won Best Play of the Year 2000 Uniter Award
• The Outcast - A dramatic poem
• Advice for Housewives and Muses - Poetry and prose
• Love on the Barbed Wire - A book of poems

Honors

• 2007 New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Full-Length Script
• 2004 John Golden Award for Excellence in Playwriting
• 2002 Antoine Vitez Center award for "Final Countdown" (published in French), Paris
• 2001-2002 Fulbright scholar – Tisch School of the Arts, Performance Studies
• 2001 writer-in-residence of KulturKontakt in Vienna, Austria
• 2000 Fellow of the British Council CAMBRIDGE SEMINAR, Cambridge University
• 2000 Representative of Romania at International Poetry Festival Struga, Macedonia
• 2000 – Best Play of the Year Uniter National Award
• 1999 – 'Poesis' Award for Theatre-Poem
• 1998 – Bucharest Writers Association Poetry Award Nomination
• 1992 – 'Lucian Blaga' Festival Poetry Award

References

Notes

Bibliography

• "Saviana stanescu : i-migrant in new york - a personal quasi-theatrical biography with images. lecture performance". www.actmedia.eu. June 10, 2009. Retrieved 2010-07-23.
• Orel, Gwen (July 19, 2006). "From Bucharest to New York, Reality Takes the Stage". New York Times. Retrieved 2010-07-23.
• Barron, James (May 17, 2007). "Inconspicuous Drama, Now Playing at the World Financial Center". New York Times. Retrieved 2010-07-23.

External links

• Wide-Eyed New Arrivals Falling in Love With the City (Review)
• "In Dialogue: Extraordinary Jokes with Saviana Stanescu" by Matthew Paul Olmos, The Brooklyn Rail, October 2008.