Bio

NORMANDY RAVEN SHERWOOD makes plays.

She is a co-artistic director of The National Theater of the United States of America (NTUSA), and has collaborated on all of the company’s shows  since 2003 as a writer, performer and designer.  These include:  The Golden Veil (2012),  CHAUTAUQUA! (2008-2012, Spalding Gray Award), Don Juan (2008), Abacus Black (2006- OBIE AWARD), What’s That On My HEAD!?! (2004) and others. The NTUSA is a theater collective whose works have been presented at The Kitchen,  PS122, The Chocolate Factory, chashama, The Walker Art Center, The Dublin Fringe Festival, the Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theater, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas at the Long Wharf Theater, Mass MoCa, ICA Boston and more.

She is the author of  CERTAIN WORDS IN FRENCH (which I shall not name), NUNKY GRUEL, THE PRIZEWINNER SPURNS HER PRIZE, It didn’t have to come to this/ Tiny Hornets, adaptations of Felipe Alfau’s story The Necrophil and Eugene Sue’s serial novel The Mysteries of Paris and many other plays and performance scenarios. These have been presented in New York City at the Ontological Hysteric Theater, chashama, BAX, 13th Street Rep., Dixon Place and many other places as well as at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs NY.   Her plays have been published in The Brooklyn Review and The Brooklyn Rail. She was nominated for the 2008 Wasserstein Prize for Emerging Female Playwrights and has participated in two residencies at The Incubator Arts Project.  As a performer she has been seen in NTUSA shows and in a couple of  Hal Hartley films.  As a costumer she has designed many shows by the NTUSA as well as productions by Jim Findlay, Mac Wellman, Young Jean Lee, Faye Driscoll (2009 BESSIE award, 837 Venice Blvd.), Half Straddle, Elizabeth Swados/The Flea Theater and others.

Other thing she does:   co-curator of the OBIE award winning performance series Little Theatre@ Dixon Place;   author of ANIMALS vs. FURNITURE, a children’s book illustrated by Jesse Hawley and published by Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011; singer in The Drunkard’s Wife, raucous balkan no-wave band; co-director of Uncanny Valley, studio/performance space in NYC.  She has an MFA in  Playwriting  from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Mac Wellman. She now teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.