Vermont College of Fine Arts

It has just been announced that Pulitzer-nominated playwright and actor Dael Orlandersmith will be a special guest speaker at VCFA's Stage & Screen Conference in June 2010.

 

Dael Orlandersmith’s play Yellowman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 after critically acclaimed runs in New Haven, Philadelphia, Seattle, and New York. Yellowman was commissioned by the McCarter Theatre and staged in Princeton in early 2002. It was developed in part with the support of the Sundance Theatre Laboratory, and its New York premiere at the Manhattan Theatre Club brought praise for both Dael's writing and her acting.

 

After a background in Performance poetry with the Nuyorican Poets Café in her teens, Dael attended Hunter College, took acting classes and began writing her own dramatic scenes for performance assignments. Her first script, Liar Liar, was written for her Manhattan Class Company. In 1995, she wrote and starred in Beauty's Daughter, which won an Obie Award, the Village Voice honor for the best works of the Off-Broadway season.

 

Her one-person show, The Gimmick, was commissioned by the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, and staged at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Connecticut in 1998; it also ran at the New York Theater Workshop the following year. Variety described The Gimmick as “an often deeply affecting tribute to the transforming power of language and learning – and the people who steadfastly believe in their promise in an environment where more immediate and visceral gratification continually beckon.” 

 

Dael's next solo show, Monster, in which she played nine characters, enjoyed a successful run at A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) in Seattle. Dael began writing her next piece, Raw Boys, while Yellowman was still enjoying its successful run. Her plays have been published by Vintage – Beauty's Daughter, Monster, The Gimmick: Three Plays (2000) and Yellowman and My Red Hand, My Black Hand (2002).  

 

In 2009 Dael performed her solo piece Stoop Stories at the Goodman Theatre. She has also written a play titled Horsedreams, has a commission from the Atlantic Theatre for Suicide Girlz, based on the music of Lou Reed, and is working on a new solo piece called Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men.

 

For more information and to register for the Stage & Screen Conference click here.