Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag

Sibyl Kempson's plays have been presented in the United States, Germany, and Norway. She launched the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. in 2015 at the Martin E. Segal Center at the City University of New York. The company’s inaugural production, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in NYC the same year. 12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens, a 3-year cycle of rituals for the Whitney Museum of American Art, began on the Vernal Equinox in March 2016, and recurred on every Solstice and Equinox through December 2018. Other recent projects include true pearl, a new opera with David Lang for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and Sasquatch Rituals at The Kitchen in NYC. Both premiered in 2018. Kempson is the recipient of a 2018 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for American Playwright at Mid-Career, for writers working indisputably at the highest level of achievement, specifically honoring “her fine craft, intertextual approach, and her body of work including Crime or Emergency and Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag.” She is also a 2014 USA Artists Rockefeller Fellow and a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow. With New York Theatre Workshop and director Sarah Benson, she received a 2013 Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Commission for Kyckling and Screaming (a translation/adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck), a 2013-14 McKnight National Residency and Commission for a new play The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S., and a Frederick Loewe Award for Musical Theater for its songs. Kempson is a New Dramatists/Full Stage USA commission for a devised piece entitled From The Pig Pile: The Requisite Gesture(s) of Narrow Approach, and a National Presenters Network Creation Fund Award for the same project. Her second collaboration with David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group, I Understand Everything Better, received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production in 2015. Her work has been funded by the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, of which she is a fellow. With Elevator Repair Service Theater Company, she received a MAP Fund grant for Fondly, Collette Richland at New York Theatre Workshop in 2015. She is a four-time Mondo Cane! commissionee at Dixon Place in NYC. As a performer Kempson toured internationally with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, New York City Players and Elevator Repair Service from 2000 – 2011.