Lisa D'Amour

Distinguished Professor of Playwriting, Lyndall Finley Wortham Chair in the Performing Arts

Lisa D’Amour is a playwright, educator, and interdisciplinary collaborator from New Orleans, Louisiana. She came up in a world of ritual, activism, group spectacle, and care, all of which continue to thrive in her work. Her theater company PearlDamour makes interdisciplinary, often site-specific works that range from intimate to large scale. Recent work includes Ocean Filibuster, a genre-crashing human-ocean showdown (currently touring), MILTON, a performance and community engagement experiment rooted in 5 U.S. towns named Milton, and How to Build a Forest, an 8-hour performance installation created with visual artist Shawn Hall. Lisa's plays have been produced by theaters across the country, including Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway, Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago), Children’s Theater Company (Minneapolis), Woolly Mammoth Theater (Washington D.C.) and ArtSpot Productions (New Orleans). Her play Detroit was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She is the recipient of the 2008 Alpert Award for the Arts in Theater, the 2011 Steinberg Playwright Award, and a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. Lisa received an MFA in Playwriting from UT Austin, and a BA in Theater/English from Millsaps College. She lives in New Orleans, where she is on the leadership team for Trinity City Comics.