Faculty

Profile

Laura Maria Censabella is currently part-time Assistant Professor in Playwriting at the College of Performing Arts, School of Drama where she won the Distinguished University-Wide Teaching Award. Her Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commissioned play Paradise was produced by Viola Davis and Julius Tennon, enjoying a sold-out run at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles in 2019. She recently wrote the screenplay for Vicangelo Films and JuVee Productions, and the L.A. Theatre Works/Audible podcast version opened LATW’s 2021/22 season. Laura is the recipient of the $10,000 ADAA Saroyan/Paul Human Rights Playwriting Award for Carla Cooks The War and her new EST/Sloan commissioned play Beyond Words will be produced in 2024 by Central Square Theater as part of its Catalyst Collaborative@MIT program where Paradise also made its world premiere.

Her plays and musicals have been developed or produced at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Gulfshore Playhouse, Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, the Women’s Project and Productions, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Portland Stage, the New Harmony Project, The Working Theatre, Lyric Stage Company of Boston, Interact Theatre (LA), m2 productions, and Urban Stages, among others. She has won three grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts: two in Playwriting, and the Geri Ashur Award in Screenwriting for her screenplay Truly Mary. She has also won two daytime television Emmy Awards. Her award-winning short film Last Call is available on Netflix and her plays have been published in the Best Short Plays of 2012-2013 (Applause Books), ConnotationPress.com, IndependentPlaywrights.com, Poems and Plays, and the St. Petersburg Review. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the Writers Guild of America East, and Honor Roll! (an action and advocacy group of women+ playwrights over 40), and she directs the Ensemble Studio Theatre Playwrights Unit.

Selected past teaching includes Columbia University, City University, Sarah Lawrence College, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Summer Literary Seminars (St. Petersburg, Russia), the O’Neill Theater Institute, the 52nd Street Project, BACA, The Lincoln Center Institute, and Poets in Public Service. She graduated from Yale University where she studied with Wole Soyinka, Henry Louis Gates, Michael Roemer, Nikos Psacharopoulos and Anthony Davis, among others. She’s received fellowships from Yaddo, SPACE on Ryder Farm, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Hedgebrook, among others. https://newplayexchange.org/users/8866/laura-maria-censabella