Karen Malpede

Karen Malpede is author, and frequently the director, of 22 plays. With the actor-director-producer, George Bartenieff, she co-founded Theater Three Collaborative in 1995. She is author of the memoir Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths (Vine Leaves Press, 2025). Her recent plays are: Troy Too (HERE, 2023);.Blue Valiant ( Farm Arts Collective, YouTube, 2021); Other Than We (LaMama, 2018, podcast for Columbia University’s Earth Institute, 2019); Extreme Whether (LaMama, 2016, ARTCOP21, Paris, 2015; Theater for the New City, 2014) Dinner During Yemen, (Signature Theater, New York, 2018); Hermes in the Anthropocene: A Dogologue (University of Iowa, Iowa City, 2019; Reed College, Portland, 2015); The Beekeeper’s Daughter (Theater for the New City, New York, 2016, Theater Row Theater, 1996, Bleeker St Theater.,1995;Dionysus Festival, Italy, 1994) Another Life (Art of Justice Festival, Gerald W. Lynch Theater, September 11, 2011; Irondale, 2012, Theater for the New City, 2013; Guild Hall, London, 2013), Iraq: Speaking of War (CUNY-Graduate Center, New York, 2006, Culture Project, New York, 2007). With George Bartenieff, she co-adapted and directed I Will Bear Witness. OBIE Award (Classic Stage,2000; New End Theatre, London; English Theatre, Berlin; Theater J, toured Germany & Austria 2001-2005); She is author of the anthology Plays in Time: The Beekeeper’s Daughter, Prophecy, Another Life, Extreme Whether (Intellect, 2016); editor of Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays (Northwestern, 2011), and author of an anthology of her early work: A Monster Has Stolen the Sun and Other Plays. Her short plays, fiction, and essays on ecofeminism, the climate crisis, a new green Federal Theater, bearing witness, the Iraq war, the U.S. torture program have been published in The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Dark Matter, Howlround, Transformations, Torture Magazine, New Theater Quarterly, TDR, New York Times, and elsewhere. She has taught theater and literature at Smith College, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and John Jay College-CUNY. McKnight National Playwrights’ Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, Vogelstein fellow.