Bio
Caridad Svich is a US Latina playwright, translator, songwriter and lyricist and editor whose theatre pieces and songs, written in English and Spanish, have been presented across the US and abroad at diverse venues including Denver Center Theatre, Mixed Blood Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, The Women’s Project, Repertorio Espanol, INTAR, 59East59, Victory Gardens, McCarren Park Pool, 7 Stages, Salvage Vanguard Theatre/TX, Halcyon Theatre, Teatro Mori Parque Arauco (Santiago, Chile), ARTheater (Cologne), Teatro Mexico (Quito, Ecuador), US-Cuba Exchange, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival/UK.
2011 premieres: her play In the Time of the Butterflies (based on the novel by Julia Alvarez), in her Spanish-language version, at Repertorio Espanol in New York City, and Magnificent Waste at Factory 449 in Washington D.C.
She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama three times, including in the year 2010 for her play Instructions for Breathing. Among her key works: 12 Ophelias (a play with broken songs), Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues, Any Place But Here, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), Fugitive Pieces, The House of the Spirits (based on the novel by Isabel Allende), The Labyrinth of Desire, The Tropic of X and the multimedia collaboration The Booth Variations. She was has been profiled in American Theatre magazine. Her work as playwright and translator has been developed by many organizations including J. Dakota Powell’s 2011 LoNyLa Lab (London-New York City-Los Angeles), the Royal Court, Traverse Theatre, Center Stage, A Contemporary Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Mark Taper Forum Theatre, and Seattle Rep.
She has translated nearly all of Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays and some of his poems, and theatrical works by Julio Cortazar, Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca, Antonio Buero Vallejo and contemporary plays from Mexico, Cuba and Catalonia. She is on the advisory board of the Us-Mexico Word Exchange at the Lark Play Development Center. Her plays are published by TCG, Smith & Kraus, Playscripts, Arte Publico Press and more. She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists, founder of NoPassport theatre alliance & press, associate editor of Routledge/UK’s Contemporary Theatre Review, contributing editor of TheatreForum, and Drama Editor for Asymptote international translation magazine. She has edited several books on theatre and performance including Trans-Global Readings and Theatre in Crisis?(both for Manchester University Press) and Divine Fire (BackStage Books).
She’s been a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University, NEA/TCG Playwright in Residence at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre, TCG/PEW Playwright in Residence at INTAR. She is a member of PEN American Center, The Dramatists Guild and is an entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino History. She trained for four years with playwright Maria Irene Fornes, and also holds an MFA in Theatre-Playwriting from UCSD.
