Karen malpede biography

Karen Malpede is an American playwright and director whose work reflects an ongoing interest in social justice issues.
Karen Malpede is an American playwright and director whose work reflects an ongoing interest in social justice issues.
Karen Malpede is author and director of 20 plays and co-founder with George Bartenieff of Theater Three Collaborative.

•

[Twenty-two years ago, after I’d started assisting Philip C. Kolin of the University of Southern Mississippi on several of his projects, he asked me to do an interview for publication in Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, the annual journal which he co-edits. I was at that time working with stage director Leonardo Shapiro (about whom I’ve written many times now on ROT) and he, in turn, was working with playwright Karen Malpede on the première production of her play, then called Going to Iraq. (The play was later retitled Blue Heaven for the production at Theater for the New City—and then returned to the playwright’s original title.) I offered Kolin an interview with Malpede, one of the most interesting emerging dramatists on the New York theater scene at the time. He accepted immediately and I proceeded to make a date with the writer at her Brooklyn home to do the interview. Below is the transcript of that session, conducted on 17 July 1992, with my original introduction (slightly amended). (I was prep

•

Malpede, Karen (1945–)

American writer. Born June 29, 1945, in Wichita Falls, Texas; dau. of Joseph James Malpede (accountant) and Doris Leibschutz (radio commentator); sister of John Malpede (performance artist); University of Wisconsin, BA, 1967; Columbia University, MFA, 1971; m. George Bartenieff (actor-playwright), 1994; children: Carrie Sophia Hash.

Published People's Theater in America (1972), beginning long-standing association with Open Theater and Living Theater; produced 1st play, A Lament for Three Women (1979); wrote extensively on theater, theater history and theater as tool for social action in such works as Women in Theater: Compassion and Hope (1983); published A Monster Has Stolen the Sun and Other Plays (1987) and Women on the Verge: Seven Avant-Garde Plays (1993), among others; conducted interviews with 9/11 survivors through Oral History and Memory Project at Columbia University (2001); with husband, wrote Obie Award-winning play I Will Bear Witness, based on Holocaust diaries of Victor Klemperer (2001).

Dictionary of Women Worldwide: 25,000

•

Karen Malpede

American playwright and director

Karen Malpede is an American playwright and director whose work reflects an ongoing interest in social justice issues. She is a co-founder of the Theater Three Collaborative in New York City, and teaches theater and environmental justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is also the editor of the notable anthology, Women in Theater: Compassion and Hope (1984).^[1]

Early life

Karen Malpede was born, a fraternal twin, in 1945, on Sheppard Air Force Base, in Wichita Falls, TX, to a Jewish mother and an Italian-American father. Both of her parents were from Chicago, and she and her brother were raised on Chicago's North Shore, in Evanston and Wilmette, IL.

She graduated from New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, IL. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree with Honors at the University of Wisconsin and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Theater at the Columbia University School of the Arts.^[2]

She holds a Clinical Training Certificate from the International Trauma Studies Program^[u