Caridad Svich

Caridad Svich Headshot

Caridad Svich is a playwright, screenwriter, translator, editor, lyricist, essayist, educator and freelance arts journalist. Her first independent feature film (as co-screenwriter) Fugitive Dreams, based on her play, premiered at the 2020 Fantasia Film Festival, 2020 Austin Film Festival and the 2020 Tallinn Black Nights Festival. Three of her plays were on the 2020 Kilroys List. She has received the 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement, the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for The House of the Spirits, based on Isabel Allende’s novel, and NNPN rolling world premieres for RED BIKE and Guapa. She has also been a Harvard/Radcliffe Institute Fellow, Tanne Foundation Fellow, NEA and Pew Fellow, and Visiting Research Fellow at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Her works in English and Spanish have been produced internationally. Other key plays in her repertoire include Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues, 12 Ophelias, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls, and The Way of Water. A significant body of her work focuses on human and environmental rights and the ‘fragile shores’ upon which many of us live. She also sustains a parallel career as a theatrical translator, chiefly known for her translations of the plays of Federico Garcia Lorca; she has also adapted for the stage novels by Julia Alvarez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Rosario Ferre, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; she has also radically reconfigured works by Shakespeare, Euripides, Sophocles and Wedekind. She is founder of NoPassport theatre alliance and press and is associate editor at Contemporary Theatre Review for Routledge UK, and is on the board of Global Performance Studies. She is published by TCG, Methuen Drama, and Intellect UK, among others. Her most recent book is on Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Routledge 4th Wall Series). She is currently working on a new book for Methuen Drama, and is in production with her second independent feature film.

She is an alumna playwright of New Dramatists, member of Ensemble Studio Theatre, and an affiliated artist with The Lark, New Georges and Woodshed Collective. She has taught at numerous colleges and universities throughout her career, among them Bard College, Barnard College and Yale School of Drama. She trained with the legendary Maria Irene Fornes for four consecutive years at INTAR’s famous HPR Lab. She was awarded the 2018 Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Visit her at https://caridadsvich.com