Lisa D’Amour is a playwright and co-artistic director of PearlDamour, a genre-defying performance company. Her plays have been produced on Broadway at Manhattan Theater Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Playwrights Horizons (NYC), Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago), The Wilma Theater (Philadelphia), Woolly Mammoth (Washington D.C.), The National Theater (London), Southern Rep (New Orleans), and many other theaters across the globe.
PearlDamour creates interdisciplinary, often site-specific works which range from the intimate to large scale. These include How to Build a Forest, an 8-hour performance in which PearlDamour builds a majestic, fabricated forest by hand, and Lost in the Meadow, a performance made for the 40-acre Meadow in Longwood Botanical Gardens, created with set designer Mimi Lien.
Lisa’s play Detroit was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and won the Obie Award for Best New American Play. She is a past recipient of the Alpert Award for the Arts, the Steinberg Playwright Award, and is a 2013 Doris Duke Artist. Lisa is an alumna of playwright residencies at New Dramatists and the Playwrights’ Center.
- Studying playwriting with Lisa was transformative. Her eye is nurturing and incisive. She helped me find the rhythm of my writing and also the larger musical structures at work in any given play. Lisa is unbelievably attuned to the frequency of a play -- emotionally, structurally, visually. I regularly think about things Lisa said in class eight years ago while I write. She exposed me to an array of plays and traditions and pushed me to be more bold, more specific, and more humane. -Max P.
- Lisa is a wonderful mentor. She's attentive, thoughtful, and very thorough in her feedback. She has helped me hone my craft and, more importantly, helped me believe in myself and my voice as an artist and writer. I don't think there's more you could ask for in a teacher. -Julia I.
- My thesis play was based on my family and I felt utterly lost more than once while writing it. Time and again, Lisa offered nuanced suggestions for how to honor a true story and attend to the writing of the play. I have never had a writing teacher who I felt believed in me as much as Lisa has. And by “believed,” I mean she offered meticulous notes, gave creative feedback, posed exciting new questions, and shared personal advice. She took me seriously and my writing life feels possible in great part because of this relationship.--Kyla S.