Playwright/Director/Choreographer
Susan Mosakowski is a multi-disciplinary theatre artist and a Co-Artistic Director of Creation Production Company. As a playwright and director her early works include: Eclipse, White/Black, for the Baltimore Theatre Project and the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), The Commie Stories (P.S. 122), and Ice Station Zebra (The Ohio). Exploring the intersection of theatre and the visual arts led her to create a trilogy of works based on Marcel Duchamp'sLARGE GLASS. The Bride and Her Extra-rapid Exposure and The Bachelor Machine were commissioned by the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Mike Steele in The Minneapolis Star and Tribune wrote, “Mosakowski’s theater has grand sweep. Her visually provocative Bride/Bachelor Trilogy is a theater piece one “reads” like a painting . . .” The final work in the trilogy, The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate, in collaboration with acclaimed architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for their International Duchamp Centennial. Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote, "Part magic show, part mixed-media collage, part art-history meditation, Susan Mosakowski's Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate is a delightful, spinning contraption of a play chock full of wittily surreal images . . ." And The Village Voice called it, "a surreal dream of a play, Rotary creates powerful and beautifully performed images of seduction for the eye and ear. The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate was also featured in the Diller & Scofidio 2004 retrospective at the Whitney Museum.
Continuing her exploration of playmaking techniques, and the intersection of language, theatre design, and the visual arts, took her to the Padua Hills Playwright's Festival (Los Angeles) where she created Cities Out of Print, as a site-specific work that was later presented at Manhattan Theatre Club. Also for Padua were Locofoco, and The Tight Fit, which The Los Angeles Times called, "a large-scale revelation." In the New York production at La MaMa, Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote, "Now the writer and director, Susan Mosakowski . . . has decided to detonate the genre that gave us The Iceman Cometh and Kennedy's Children. The result is a wittily staged, peppery slice of absurdism called The Tight Fit." Later plays include: Harry and the Cannibals and Nighttown (The Flea). Joseph Hurley from The Irish Echo wrote, “It’s impossible to see the current production without thinking again and again of Beckett in general and Waiting for Godot.” Other plays followed: The Making of Eugenie Doe presented at Ohio Theatre's Ice Factory 2004, Third Rail Quill commissioned by the Working Theater, and Man-Made. Andrea Stevens of The New York Times wrote, "For sure, Susan Mosakowski's Man-Made is a play of ideas . . ." Recent plays include A World Apart and Escape (2012) as part of La MaMa’s 50th Year Anniversary Season.
Choreographic projects include The Tower with Matthew Maguire and Glenn Branca for the Walker Art Center (Mpls.), Visions of Don Juan at the Pepsico Summerfare, and Molière’s comedy-ballet The Imaginary Invalid for the Long Beach Opera (CA). She has also created dance theatre adaptations of Dante's Inferno (Theater for the New City), and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (La MaMa Annex) with composers Robin Holcomb and Wayne Horowitz.
Her awards include a Rockefeller Foundation Playwriting Fellowship, a National Endowment Playwriting Fellowship, three consecutive Northwest Area Fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a J.M. Kaplan Fund grant, and numerous foundation grants. In 2012 she received a working commission from The People’s Light and Theatre Company to create a site-specific work for The Longwood Gardens. Currently she is a resident playwright of New Dramatists. Publications include: The Tight Fit and Cities Out of Print, Padua Playwrights Press (Los Angeles), Ice Station Zebra, VRI Publishing (Los Angeles), The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate in FLESH: Architectural Probes, Princeton University, and The Commie Stories in Alles Und Noch Viel Mehr, Das Poetische ABC, Bern, Switzerland. Her artist's book of The Bride and Her Extra-rapid Exposure is part of the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Collection of Concrete Poetry.
She has taught directing and playwriting at Columbia, Fordham, and New York University, and is currently on the faculty of The School of Visual Arts. She has served as a panelist for the New York State Council on the Arts Theatre Program, the Bush Foundation, the Princess Grace Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and others. She has been a resident artist at the Long Beach Opera, the Padua Hills Playwrights' Festival, the Illusion Theatre (Mpls.), the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Ireland's Tyrone Guthrie Playwriting Center, and The Weston Playhouse.
In addition to her theatre work, she is the Director of the Audio Book Studio at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library (The New York Public Library) where she produces talking books for the blind. She has also produced audio books commercially for Time Warner, Penguin/Putnam, and FSG. Her acclaimed productions include: producing and directing Ian McKellen in his reading of Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, as well as working with authors William Kennedy, Jamaica Kincaid, Lawrence Block, Grace Paley and others. She holds a M.F.A. from New York University's Tisch School of Arts, a M.A. from New York University, and a M.S. from Pratt Institute.
Her next play, SLAM, is slated for 2014.