Karen Malpede’s just finished play Prophecy will receive two public readings in New York this spring, at New York Theater Workshop, in late February, and at the Makor Steinhardt Center of the 92nd St. Y, on April 23. The play will be presented as a staged reading in Berlin, at the English Language Theater, on March 31. She is the creator of a ritual docu-drama “Iraq: Speaking of War” presented at the Culture Project in October, 2006, and the CUNY-Graduate Center, March 19, 2005. Her short fiction about life post-9/11 has been published in Confrontation, TriQuarterly, The Healing Muse, Out-of-Line and the anthology 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11. She is the author of thirteen plays produced in the US and Europe, including: “Us” (anthologized in Women on the Verge, produced in New York, Paris, England & Austrailia) “Better People” (anthologized in Angels of Power, produced in New York, Australia), “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” (produced in New York, Missouri, Italy, Australia, and under option as a motion picture). She co-adapted with her husband, the actor George Bartenieff, and directed him in the Obie award-winning one-person play “I Will Bear Witness”, the diaries of Victor Klemperer, which toured Germany and Austria, played New York, Washington D.C., London and Berlin. Her essays on a theater of witness are published in anthologies and journals. Two monologues from the play Prophecy will be published in Best Women’s Monologues of the Millennium. Her early plays are published in the collection A Monster Has Stolen the Sun and Other Plays. As an Oral Historian working for Columbia University, she has interviewed veterans, rescuers, victims and survivors of the 9/11 attacks. She trained in trauma and human rights at the International Trauma Studies Program and taught drama and dream work to combat veterans in Sarajevo while the city was still being shelled. She has given readings and lectures and staged her plays in Egypt, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, England, Germany. She regularly works with Arab-American and Jewish artists in New York City. She is on the play advisory committee for the National Foundation of Jewish Culture. Malpede has won McKnight, NYFA and NYSCA among other writers and production grants. She received an MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts.
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