Discipline: Theatre – playwriting

Cusi Cram

Discipline: Theatre – playwriting
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2022

Cusi Cram’s plays have been produced by Rattlestick Theater, Primary Stages, LAByrinth Theater Company, The Denver Center, The Williamstown Theater Festival, South Coast Repertory, The Atlantic Theater, New Georges, and on stages large and petite all over the country.

She's written teleplays and pilots for both kids and adults and worked as a writer on Showtime's “The Big C, starring Laura Linney. She was long-time writer on WGBH’s children’s program, “Arthur for which she received three Emmy nominations. Cusi’s short film, Wild and Precious, made through AFI's Directing Workshop for Women, won The Adrienne Shelly and Nancy Mallone Awards and played at numerous festivals.

Her work has been generously supported by The O’Neill Theater Center, The Bogliasco Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, The Herrick Foundation, The Ford Foundation, Space on Ryder Farm, NYFA, The Venturous Fund, and the Stillpoint Fund.

Cram sits on the board of the Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers and Rattlestick Theater. She is currently the associate chair of the dramatic writing program at Tisch School of the Arts.

At MacDowell in 2022, Cram worked on a short film commission for Juilliard entitled On the Rocks. She also continued working and researching her multimedia theater piece, NYC: 1975. The piece takes a deep dive into the year New York City almost went bankrupt and how the responses to New York's budget crisis forever shifted the city's priorities away from taking care of its inhabitants toward catering to business interests. Cusi is currently under commission from the Sloane Foundation, EST, and the Dorset Theater Festival. Her one act play, Los Complicados, is part of the Ensemble Studio Theater's Marathon of One-Act plays celebrating BIPOC joy.

Studios

Wood

Cusi Cram worked in the Wood studio.

Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…

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