KIA
CORTHRON
Plays, including A Cool Dip In The Barren Saharan Crick, Force Continuum, and Breath, Boom, have been produced in New York by Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, Atlantic Theater Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club; regionally by Yale Repertory Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Baltimore’s Center Stage, Hartford Stage, Children’s Theatre Company, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, New York Stage and Film; in London by the Royal Court Theatre and Donmar Warehouse; and elsewhere. She was the 2017 resident playwright of Chicago’s Eclipse Theatre which produced three of her plays. Arena Stage produced her commissioned Tempestuous Elements in 2022.
Awards for her body of work for the stage include the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, Horton Foote Prize, Flora Roberts Award, United States Artists Jane Addams Fellowship, Simon Great Plains Playwright Award, McKnight National Residency, Lee Reynolds Award, National Endowment for the Arts, Otto Award for Political Theatre, and others.
She released her second novel Moon And The Mars in August 2021. Her debut The Castle Cross The Magnet Carter was the winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice.
Residencies include MacDowell, Blue Mountain Center, Art Omi, Hermitage Retreat, Ucross, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bellagio Creative Arts Residency (Italy), Dora Maar House (France), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Château de Lavigny (Switzerland), Cill Rialaig (Ireland), Siena Art Institute artist in residence (Italy).
TV: “The Wire” (Edgar and Writers Guild Outstanding Series awards), “The Jury.” Co-produced Imagine: Yemen and contributed a short musical which was later animated and screened at London’s United Nations/U.K. We The Peoples Film Festival. She serves on the Dramatists Guild Council, is a New Dramatists alumnus, and is a member of the Authors Guild.
NEW PLAYS BY
KIA CORTHRON
FISH
Between acting as guardian to her fifth-grade brother and losing her BFF to the charter school on the upper floor, tempestuous Tree is trying her best just to navigate senior year and collect that diploma. Jasmine Harris is a teacher returning to Tree’s high school after a seven-year departure that resulted in scandal and left her embittered—and, like Tree, just biding her time. When unforeseen monumental circumstances alter Tree’s existence, the teenager is forced to search for answers well beyond the confines of any standardized test, and Harris must decide if she’s willing to help Tree find them.
