Caridad Svich is a playwright, songwriter/lyricist, translator, and editor who was born in the United States of Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents.
Biography
A member of the New York's New Dramatists, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and her Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, San Diego. She has written over forty full-length plays and fifteen translations as well as other short works. Svich has been a guest artist at the Traverse Theater in Edinburgh and the Royal Court Theater and has taught playwriting workshops at Paine's Plough Theater in London and the US-Cuba Writer's Conference in Havana. She has been a guest lecturer at the Yale School of Drama and a visiting faculty member at Bennington College in Vermont. Caridad Svich is the founder of theatre alliance & press NoPassport her work has impacted communities of multiple diversities and has responded to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the US Gulf region, veterans and their families, survivors of trauma and those committed to artistic expression of advocacy for US Latin writing voices, and engagement with representations of the “fragile shores” in our lives, amongst others. Svich sustains a career as a theatrical translator as well, mainly of the dramatic work of Federico García Lorca. She has received fellowships from Harvard/Radcliffe, NEA/TCG, PEW Charitable Trust, and California Arts Council. She holds an MFA in Theatre-Playwriting from UCSD, and she has also trained for four consecutive years with Maria Irene Fornes in INTAR’s legendary HPRL Lab. She teaches creative writing and playwriting at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Primary Stages’ Einhorn School of Performing Arts. She has taught playwriting at Bard, Barnard, Bennington, Denison, Ohio State, ScriptWorks, UCSD, and Yale School of Drama. She is the co-organizer and curator of After Orlando which was an international theatre action in response to the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub. After Orlando featured a collection of readings and other short works being performed. Each performance lasted between 3-5 minutes. They had over 40 theatrical institutions and universities nationwide and abroad sign on to participate.
Awards
2015 Source Festival finalist 2013 National Latino Playwrights Award 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize 2012 Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Drama 2009 Lee Reynolds Award, League of Professional Theatre Women 2009 HOLA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting 2007 Whitfield Cook Award for New Writing 2004, Selected for inclusion Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino History 2003 National Latino Playwrights Award 2002-2003 Harvard UniversityRadcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow 2002-2003 TCG/Pew Charitable Trust National Theatre Artist Residency 1997-1998 NEA/TCG Playwrights Residency 1994 Rosenthal New Play Prize
