diane davis

 (Updated 1/12/2024) I am a playwright living in NYC, a member of the Actor’s Studio Playwrights/Directors Unit (PDU), a Writer-in-Resident of Theater East, and a facilitator for Eden Theater Company’s (ETC) PlayLab. My plays have been developed or produced at the New Ohio Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Primary Stages, Howl Playwrights, AMIOS, Barrow Group, HB Studios, Goddard College, and Columbia University. My full-length play Complicity received an HB Studio Residency Award, and I received an Honor Roll Intensive Residency at Workshop Theater for my play Broken Arpeggio. My most recent one-act plays include Night Becomes Morning (Chain), The Memorial Tree (Columbia), INSTA and In-Between (Collab Workshop), and On the Line, and Dueling Technicians (AMIOS Shotz). I produced The Room Series (ETC),  Scrambled Porn (Flea Theater) and FlipSide (Flea Theater). I studied acting at Neighborhood Playhouse with Sanford Meisner, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I earned a BA in Theater at Bennington College, an MA in history at CUNY, and an MFA in Playwriting at Columbia University (2025 cohort). I have served on the Board of Directors for the Amoralists Theater Company and the League of Professional Theatre Women (LPTW). I am currently the Artistic Director for Eden Theater Company (www.edentheater.og).

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

MORE ABOUT ME:
All my skills as a performer, mother, and academic come cohere to shape the way I write plays. Groomed to play classical piano, I rebelled in my undergraduate years to study acting and everything I could about theater. While acting, I continued playing music (jazz piano and bass guitar) in rock bands. I eventually wrote my first play while teaching theater at an NYC public high school, about a man who believed Marylyn Monroe faked her death, so he faked his death to meet her. While the musicality of language shapes the dialogue in my plays, motherhood shapes the questions I explore.  The theme of wanting to be seen and heard runs like a red thread through my stories, but also how women wear many masks to survive the binary culture of American society. Rooted in a feminine aesthetic, my plays consider how gender influences relationships, implicitly or explicitly, motivating social behaviors and norms between people and groups.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON:
Broken Arpeggio is a family drama about a mother, her four daughters, and the impact of one child's trauma on a family’s development. Daughter 3 is jazz to her mother’s classical music family. After an assault by a music teacher in fourth grade, she finds healing in the love of music and playing the piano. As she is unable to talk about what happened, Daughter 3 falls down the rabbit hole of addiction. As the family starts to realize that all is not right with her, they commit Daughter 3 into a psychiatric institution. When she comes out the other side, the family then begins a healing journey by coming together for a family portrait. This story, of a single daughter’s descent into shame and confusion, becomes a family’s story of learning to understand that looking good does not mean being good. Broken Arpeggio is the family’s story of grappling with choices made, and discovering home is not always what it appears to be.