Catherine Filloux
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Catherine Filloux is a French-Algerian-American playwright. She has received awards from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the O'Neill, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, and the Asian Cultural Council. In 2003 she was a Fullbright Senior Specialist in playwriting in Cambodia.
Filloux's plays have confronted the issue of genocide in many nations. She was first drawn to the subject on reading of the psychosomatic blindness suffered by a group of Cambodian women after witnessing the massacres of the Khmer Rouge, a story that formed the basis of her 1996 play Eyes of the Heart. She continued to work with survivors of the Cambodian genocide, developing the oral history project A Circle of Grace with the Cambodian Women's Group at St. Rita's Centre for Immigration and Refugee Services in the Bronx, New York.
Her 2005 play Lemkin's House is based on the life of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew and American immigrant lawyer who invented the word genocide in 1944 and spent his life striving to have it recognized as an international crime.
Filloux states "For a while, these crimes were the 'best-kept secrets,' but they're not even secrets. They happen all the time, and nobody cares. And that's the problem on some level with doing this kind of theater. There's just a little wall that's been built up against these things, and to write theater about them is part of the challenge." [1]
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[edit] Biography
Of her parents, Filloux says, "My dad was born in the center of France, and he became an adventurer," who boated from France to New York in a catamaran. "My mom was a very literate person who loved literature" and wrote poetry in both French and English. As a child, Filloux moved with her family to San Diego, where she grew up. She says, "We grew up ... in this kind of schism of Algeria, France, and San Diego. So it made for a background of not really knowing where one belongs..." [2]
Filloux received her M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU) and her French Baccalaureate with Honors in Toulon, France.
[edit] Works
- Killing the Boss 2008, Cherry Lane Studio Theatre, New York
- Lemkin’s House 2005, Kamerni Teatar 55, Sarajevo
- Silence Of God 2002, Contemporary American Theater Festival, West Virginia
- The Floating Box: A Story in Chinatown, 2001
- Lessons Of My Father 2001, HB Playwrights Foundation & Theatre, New York
- The Beauty Inside 2001, HB Playwrights Foundation & Theatre, New York
- Mary And Myra 2000, Contemporary American Theater Festival, West Virginia
- Photographs From S-21 1998, HB Playwrights Foundation & Theatre, New York
- White Trash 1997, Women's Project & Productions, New York
- Eyes Of The Heart 1996, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Connecticut
- All Dressed Up And Nowhere To Go 1994, Playwrights Theatre of Baltimore, Maryland
- The Price Of Madness 1992, Alleyway Theatre, Buffalo New York
- Venus In The Birdbath 1990, Alleyway Theatre, Buffalo New York
- Arthur’s War
- Cut To: The Deal
- The Awakening
- The G Word
- Storks
- The Russian Doll
- Three Continents
- Accepting Applause
- Converting
- The Sun Always Rose
- Altar Ego
- Prodigal Son
- Priscilla’s Story
[edit] Awards
- The Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays' Roger L. Stevens award
- Eric Kocher Playwrights Award (National Playwrights Conference, O'Neill Theater Center)
- Fulbright Senior Specialist (Cambodia & Morocco)
- James Thurber Playwright-In-Residence; Asian Cultural Council Artist's Residency Grant in Asia
- Winner Nausicaa Franco-American Play Contest
- Rockefeller MAP Fund (for Floating Box with Hwang)
- 4-time Heideman Award Finalist, Actors Theatre of Louisville
