Bio

Edith Freni has written well over 30 plays, several essays and numerous works of short fiction. She considers herself a playwright first and foremost and her work has been produced, developed and read at numerous theatrical institutions in New York and nationally including New York Theatre Workshop, LAByrinth Theatre Company, The Williamstown Theatre Festival, Ensemble Studio Theater, PS 122, Theatre Row, Center Stage New York, The Lark Theatre, The Producer’s Club, The Present Company Theatorium, The Tank, The Brick Theatre, The Kraine Theatre, Collective Unconscious, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, Manhattan Theatre Source, The Trilogy Annex Theatre, The Rita and Burton Goldberg Theater at NYU, and Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI.

Edith earned both her BFA and MFA in Playwriting from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dramatic Writing, where she received a 2006 Rita & Burton Goldberg Playwriting Fellowship and the 2007 Harry Kondoleon Graduate Playwriting Award. As a long-time member of Youngblood, the emerging playwright’s unit at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Edith developed multiple plays under the guidance of the group’s founder Chris Smith (former AD of The Magic Theatre) and EST’s late founder, Curt Dempster.

Her play WATERBORN was produced in March 2004 as part of Youngblood’s Thicker Than Water IV and is published by  Dramatists Play Service. Her full length, THE WORKAROUND received a workshop production on the EST mainstage in early March 2005, and a selection of her monologues can be found in Hot Blooded, New Monologues from the Members of Youngblood (Playscripts, Inc.), as well as in The Best Women's Stage Monologues 2006 (Smith & Kraus). EST produced her one-act play MY DOG HEART in the 2007 Marathon of New Plays. BOTTOM’S UP! began as a ten minute play written for Youngblood’s popular Sunday Brunch series in the spring of 2008 and was later expanded and subsequently developed by The 24Seven Lab and LAByrinth Theatre Company, and was publicly presented in EST’s 2009 Octoberfest Festival of New Plays.

In addition to her work at EST, Edith has enjoyed fruitful relationships with many other theatrical institutions. She was a Lark Theatre Playwriting fellow in 2003, working under the guidance of Arthur Kopit and John Clinton Eisner. Her play HELP YOURSELF was commissioned by The Williamstown Theatre Festival and received a workshop production at the festival in 2007. In April 2007, her play MOMMA was presented as part of the Best of the Boroughs Festival at PS 122. In 2008, she received a commission from the McCarter Theatre Educational Department to write a children’s adaptation of The Odyssey. HOME AT LAST was performed at the McCarter in the spring of 2008 and is published by Playscripts, Inc. Currently, she is developing TOTAL POWER EXCHANGE, a play about sex trafficking and the internet, with frequent collaborator Victor Maog. The play has been read in New York at New York Theatre Workshop and The Public Theatre, and has been developed by The Lark, Woodshed Collective and The 24Seven Lab. Her plays BABY GIRL and KIDSTUFF were both produced by Partial Comfort Productions, a company that Edith has been a member of since 2004. Edith is also the co-founder and literary manager of the New York-based developmental theater company, The 24Seven Lab. Now entering its sixth season, 24Seven has aided in the development of over 35 new plays by emerging and mid-career writers, many of which have gone on to enjoy further development and productions at institutions such as The Public Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, The Alliance Theatre, and South Coast Rep, among numerous others.

Edith has been a nominee for the Cherry Lane Mentor Program, the WordBridge Playwrights Workshop, the Seattle Rep Women’s Playwrights Workshop, and the Wasserstein Prize, given by the Dramatists Guild of America. She has also been a finalist for the Summer Play Festival and the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference. Edith is a native New Yorker, a displaced upper West-sider, and a happy product of the NYC public school system. She was a competitive figure skater for 12 years and fought in the NYC amateur circuit with Coach Lee Shabaka's Team Freeform Women’s Boxing Club for six years. She currently lives in Jackson Heights, Queens but enjoys spending her summers in Steamboat Springs, Colorado where she was recently the Interim Head of Creative and Dramatic Writing at the renowned Perry Mansfield Performing Arts School and Camp.

Click to download Edith's CV in PDF format.

Photo: Shraddha Borawake

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