Saviana Stănescu

Saviana Stănescu (born 1967) is a Romanian-American award-winning playwright, ARTivist, and poet based in Ithaca, New York.

Hailed as one of the most exciting voices to have emerged in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Stănescu 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. Richard Schechner wrote on the cover of Stănescu's poetry book ''Diary of a Clone'': "Saviana Stănescu is for and of the 21st century. She is hot and cool, witty and brave, sexy and weird, politically knowing and cynical. But most of all, she is an extraordinary writer."

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

Stănescu's cutting-edge plays have been developed/produced at Women's Project, La MaMa, 59E59, New York Theatre Workshop, Ensemble Studio Theater, 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 and Film (UNATC) in Bucharest, Romania. 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. Provided by Wikipedia