Callie Kimball

Visiting Lecturer in Theater

Associations

Theater

Schaeffer Theatre, Room 303

207-753-6958ckimball@bates.edu

About

Callie Kimball is an award-winning, nationally commissioned and internationally produced playwright, with a dedicated track record of advocating for underrepresented voices. She earned her MFA under Tina Howe at Hunter College, where she won the Rita & Burton Goldberg Playwriting Award two years in a row. Her plays have been produced and developed in New York, Chicago, LA, and DC, at the Kennedy Center, MCC Theater, Lark Play Development Center, Rep Stage, Greater Boston Stage Company, Portland Stage Company, Echo Theatre, The Brick Theater, Project Y Theatre, Team Awesome Robot, Washington Shakespeare Company, Theater at Monmouth, Theatre L’Acadie, Halcyon Theatre, Florida Studio Theatre, Mad Horse Theatre, The Drama League, and many colleges and festivals across the country.

She’s an Affiliate Artist at Portland Stage Company, an Affiliate Writer at the Playwrights’ Center, Playwright-in-Residence at Theater at Monmouth, and a former MacDowell Fellow. She won a Ludwig Vogelstein grant to research her play “Sofonisba,” which won the Clauder Gold Prize, was a finalist for the O’Neill, a semifinalist for the Princess Grace Award, and was included on The Kilroys’ 2016 List. The play has had readings at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and at the Farnsworth Museum, and is one of four winning plays at the 2017 Ashland New Plays Festival.

Her first teaching job was teaching Shakespeare in a juvenile detention facility, and she has taught playwriting to over 1,000 students through various nonprofit arts organizations and colleges. She has taught or been a visiting guest artist at Bates College, Bowdoin College, Colby College, Maine College of Art, Southern Maine Community College, Kings College London Shakespeare Centre, the ACS International Schools in London, National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, to name a few. Academic articles about her plays have appeared in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, and in Comedia Performance: A Journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater.

Her themes range from historical dramas and classical adaptations to socio-political comedies and futuristic dystopias. Many of her plays explore emotional violence and parasitic relationships, with characters who live at the intersection of language and power, and struggle to break free from the constraints of class, race, gender, and systemic abuse.

Some have described her plays as feminist, which is lovely, but really she just writes plays where the main characters have jobs and goals and happen to be women.

http://calliekimball.com/