Barbara Lhota

Barbara Lhota

www.barbaralhota.com

Barbara Lhota is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter who has written over 200 plays and has had over 55 productions. The Studio's production of her play, Third Person, was selected by the Boston Herald as one of the top ten plays of the 1993-94 season. She received her MFA in Dramatic Writing from Brandeis University, where she was an artist-in-residence and taught playwriting.

Barbara now lives in Chicago where she most recently won the Babes With Blades' International Playwriting Competition Joining Sword and Pen for her play Los Desaparecidos: The Vanished, which was produced in April, 2008 with Babes With Blades at the The Raven Theater. This past February her children's play, The Nerdy Girl and the Intergalactic Dog was produced at The Side Project's Rascal Children's Theater. Barbara collaborated on the musical numbers in The Nerdy Girl with John Sparks, the artistic director of the Theatre Building Chicago. Her plays have been produced at a large variety of theaters in Boston, New York, Chicago, and various other cities across the country...and beyond.

In terms of film... Barbara has most recently worked with director, Matt Wechsler, on the 48-Hour Film Project in Chicago by co-writing the script Power Singles. Power Singes won awards for best director and best special effects and was nominated for best screenplay and a number of other awards. Power Singles was also runner up for best film of 2009. Barb's film short film script, Zero Count, is also currently in production with Filmmakers in Action.

Barbara's plays Strangers and Romance are published in Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2001. She is currently working with Columbia College film professor, Carter Martin, on a film version of Strangers which will screen in Chicago in November, 2009. Strangers and Romance, Barbara's most frequently produced plays, have received a number of awards which include the American College Theater Festival Award, and The Love Creek Theater Co. Samuel French One-Act Contest Finalist.

Barbara is the co-author of four collections of 15-minute plays as part of the Smith & Kraus' Forensics' Series which include:

* Co-authored with Janet Milstein, Forensics Series Volume 1: Duo Practice & Competition: Thirty-five 8-10 Minute Original Comedic Plays, Smith and Kraus

* Co-authored with Janet Milstein, Forensics Series Volume 2: Duo Practice & Performance: Thirty-five 8-10 Minute Original Dramatic Plays, Smith and Kraus

* Co-authored with Ira Brodsky, Forensics Series Volume 3: Duo Practice and Competition: Thirty-five 8-10 Minute Original Comedic Plays for Two Females, Smith and Kraus

* Co-authored with Ira Brodsky, Forensics Series Volume 4: Duo Practice and Competition: Thirty-five 8-10 Minute Original Dramatic Plays for Two Females, Smith and Kraus

She also has two monologues from Romance which are included in The Best Male Monologues of 2001 edited by D.L Lepidus, Smith and Kraus and approximately 50 male and female monologues included in the Audition Arsenal Series.

She was awarded the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Award for Playwriting for Hanging By a Thread at Brandeis University and her full-length screenplay, The Long Shot, was optioned by Elizabeth Klaviter, a staff writer on the hit T.V. show Grey's Anatomy.

Barbara is currently working on two new plays - Echo, a drama set in the early 1990's about a family with a non-verbal autistic child using facilitated communication as a means of communication, and a 1940's screwball comedy, The Double, for Babes with Blades which received a staged reading in December, 2010.