diane davis

Diane is a playwright, director, and producer/Artistic Director for Eden Theater Company. She was an HB Studios Residency Fellow finishing her full-length play Complicity for production in December 2022. Her other plays include, Lady Margaret, Session Spotting, and When Night Becomes Morning. She has written and directed several ten-minute plays produced by AMIOS Shotz, and curated and directed a variety of plays for Eden Theater Company and the Playwrights Lab. She received my BA in Theatre from Bennington College, studied acting at The Royal Academy in London, with Sandy Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and interned at the Actors Studio. She is currently completing her MFA in Playwriting at Goddard College. 

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA:
Website: https://d-davis.com/
IG: @ddavis_steiker
FB: www.facebook.com/dianedavis.writer 

MORE ABOUT ME:
My stories are inspired by the history around us: both the examination of the past, and how our present creates a history. I don’t write history plays, but I look at playwriting through the lens of a historian; a ward to document the past of something and allow the “audience” to decide its value. There is nothing arbitrary in playwriting: each word, line, and beat, is a deliberate choice. By examining the choices playwrights bring to the stage to tell their stories, I seek to more intuitively know how my choices will create the world - the story - that moment - needing to be expressed. My goal as an artist - writer - playwright - is to learn to let go, and then get out of my own way and become my authentic playwriting self. 

WHAT I'M WORKING ON:
​Lady Margaret the story of how the Shakespeare Lady of New Haven developed as an artist before she succumbed to schizophrenia. As a female artist during the 1970s, Margaret Holloway developed into one of the most promising African American female theatrical artists of her generation. Her work at Bennington College and then two different stints at Yale School of Drama School under the direction of Robert Brustein, provided forums for her craft development, while at the same time constantly pushing against her ascendency as an African American woman artist in the 1970s. As her decline became more apparent, those institutions, meant to care and nurture the artist, could not or would not save her from demons. On her death bed, she examines a life lived and whether she could have been saved from her fate.