Dale Griffiths Stamos

Dale Griffiths Stamos is an award-winning screenwriter and playwright. Dale’s short and full-length plays have been produced around the country. She is the recipient of the Heideman Award from Actors Theatre of Louisville, and is a top-ten winner, twice, in the Writers Digest Stage Play Competition. Dale has written six short films, three of which she directed, which have all been official selections at multiple film festivals, garnering two audience and two jury awards.  Additionally she has won Awards of Excellence three times from Best Shorts Competition, and is the recipient of the Bill Paxton Award from the Ojai Film Festival. She has penned two feature-length screenplays:  One White Crow and Blue Jay Singing in the Dead of Night,  which have been named as finalist, semi-finalist, or quarter-finalist in a number of screenwriting competitions including the New York City International Screenplay Awards, StoryPros International Screenplay Contest, Los Angeles International Screenplay Competition, Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival, Creative World Awards and Script Summit.  She is also the author of the nonfiction book RenWomen: What Modern Renaissance Women Have to Teach Us About Living Rich, Fulfilling Lives. Dale is on the faculty of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference where she leads a workshop on “Story Structure for All Genres.”

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.dalegriffithsstamos.com/
https://www.facebook.com/dale.stamos

MORE ABOUT ME
One of my most gratifying experiences early in my career was seeing my Heideman award winning play, “The Unintended Video” performed at Actors Theatre of Louisville. The theater put us up in a local hotel, and gave us a tour of the theater before the show,  and then, after the performance, we all went out for drinks and I sat next to then Literary Manager Michael Bigelow Dixon who told me my ending monologue was one of the best he’d ever read. ATL made me feel so appreciated and valued as a new playwright – it gave me the confidence to move forward with this crazy career!  As far as plays that have deeply affected me: I would say Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood (where I realized you can mix challenging intellectual themes with intriguing characters and story) and Stephen Sondheim’s Company (where I realized a musical can capture all kinds of nuance and dark and light contradictions in human relationships.) My favorite thing to do when not writing?  I would say music.  I play the guitar and piano and started out in my twenties writing songs.  So that desire to play and create music still remains. Finally, why do I keep doing theater (even though sometimes it breaks my heart)? It is because, even though I also write screenplays, theater is the place where character and dialogue reign supreme – where just through people talking in front of a live audience, an entire story unfurls. The elation I feel sitting in an audience, watching them respond to one of my plays — hushed in dramatic moments, laughing in comedic ones, and oh that lovely applause — is like nothing else!

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I am working on revisions / rewrites of a new full-length play.  I am also working on the first draft of a screenplay.

KEYWORDS
Drama, science, women in science, historical, consciousness, quantum mechanics, astronomy, biography