Caridad Svich is a playwright-translator-scholar-editor and songwriter. She was born in Philadelphia, PA, of Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian descent and was raised in seven US cities, mostly along the eastern seaboard. She has been selected for inclusion in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latino/a History in the United States and the Encyclopedia of Latino Literature,is an alumna playwright of New Dramatists in New York City, and has been short-listed twice for the PEN USA-West Award in Drama (2005 & 2001). She is a recipient of New Dramatists' 2007 Whitfield Cook Prize for New Writing for her play Lucinda Caval. This play was also a finalist for the 2008 National Arts Club Playwrights First Award, and the 2007 National Latino Playwriting Award. She was invited to take part in the 10th Seattle Rep/Hedgebrook's Women's Playwrights Festival. She was the Playwright-in-Residence at the William Inge Center for the Arts in Kansas. Caridad was a recipient of a Harvard University Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship (2002-2003) and the TCG/Pew National Theatre Artist Grant at INTAR, NY (2002-2003). She was Jonathan R. Reynolds Playwright-in-Residence at Denison University (2002), a Thurber House fellow in playwriting at Ohio State University (2001), and she held an NEA/TCG Playwriting Residency at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre in Los Angeles (1997-1998).
Other awards: John Gassner New Play Award (second prize 2005); National Latino Playwriting Award (2003); Rosenthal New Play Prize (1993). She was finalist twice for the National Arts Club Playwrights First Award (2008 and 2005).
Recent commissions: Repertorio Espanol to write stage adaptation of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits (2008); Marin Theatre Company to translate Marisela Orta's American Triage (2008); Montclair State University Department of Theatre to write libretto and lyrics for new music-theatre piece (composer Robert Aldridge) Murieta or Tales from EI Dorado (2007); Lark Theatre, NY in association with FONCA, Mexico (2006); UC-San Diego Department of Theatre & Dance (2006); Open Meadows Foundation & Airmid Theatre (2005-2006).
Previous commissions: from the Lycée Français International High School in San Francisco (2005); The Lark & INBA (20042005); EST/Sloan Foundation (2001); INTAR (2001, 1998, 1991); and the National Theater Translation Fund (1992). She was also resident playwright at INTAR in New York (1988-1992), where she trained with Maria Irene Fornes.
Internationally, she is currently on the Fulbright Senior Specialists Candidate roster, was main speaker/performer at Performing Literatures Conference at the University of Leeds, UK, a keynote speaker, sponsored by Routledge, at the symposium on intercultural theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London (2005), an arts emissary of the US State Department in Bogota, Colombia (2004), and a guest artist at the Actors Touring Company in London (2000), the Traverse Theatre/UK (1998), and the Royal Court Theatre (1994). She is adaptor/translator of the US version of Serbian dramatist Ugljesa Sajtinac's Huddersfield funded in part by the Trust for Mutual Understanding (2005). She is editor of Out of Silence and Trans-global Readings (Manchester University Press, 2009 & 2003), and Divine Fire (BackStage Books, 2005). She is co-editor of Out of the Fringe (TCG, 2000), and Theatre in Crisis? (MUP, 2002). Some of her translations are collected in Federico Garcia Lorca: Impossible Theater (Smith & Kraus, 2000). She is founder of the national theatre alliance, press NoPassport; a contributing editor of TheatreForum;and an associate editor of Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge/UK).
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