Susan Hansell

Susan Hansell began to write for the stage by constructing texts for dancers, choreographers, and performance artists, including herself. Perhaps as a result, stylized movement and physical elements remain theatrical aspects in her plays, which include the 10-minute A History, reviewed on NPX, podcast by Panglossian Productions, staged as a reading by the Alternative Theater Company, produced as a filmed zoom video by Spark Creative Works, and included in American Blues Theater's (Chicago) 2022 RIPPED Festival; the new full-length absurdist comedy An Ocean of Bees, seen in an early cold reading at The Tank (NYC) as presented by The Bechdel Group then selected for development by The Bridge Initiative and staged as a reading at the Bechdel Festival 2.0 (Phoenix); and the new historically-driven three-act drama At Dawn with the Rain and the Stars, from which the first act Who Will Witness for the Witness was staged as a reading by the Shattered Glass Project (Seattle), reviewed on NPX, and produced in 2022 by The St. Louis Actors’ Studio, and, from which the second act Every Concentrated Fragment was showcased at the 2017 William Inge Festival then produced by the Tucson Players in 2018, by the Bay Area Women’s History Festival in January-February 2020, and virtually in August 2021 by the Femme Fatale Festival, Washington DC.

Born Susan Hansell Smuck in Stockton CA, Susan Hansell (she/her) wrote poetry and fiction from childhood, when, unbeknownst to her, she won a school creative (short story) writing contest judged by independent writers but invalidated by an AP English teacher at her public school because she was not in that AP English teacher's class. This incident was told to her by her mother years later when she received her first New York City production. In her high school years she became the first swimmer from Sonoma County to qualify for US Senior Nationals and she swam in national and international competition representing Petaluma Swim Club. Her ancestry is Scotch-Irish-British Isles, French-German, Ashkenazi Jewish (Polish-Ukrainian), Scandinavian-Finnish, Indigenous American, and North African. She has lived in various parts of North and Central America, including ten years in NYC, during which time she wrote several freely-adapted classics, including My Medea, (a Best American Short Plays series selection, Applause Theatre Books) and where she was commissioned to write American Rose (a finalist for the Jane Chambers National Playwriting Award), produced at The Ohio in NYC.

A Day In, Affair on the Air, Drop It, Don't, and Trolls (all early solo performance works from her student years which were shown at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at The Harold Clurman, with two appearing in Heinemann’s More Monologues for Women by Women) can be seen on YouTube. Susan Hansell holds a BA with high honors from UC Berkeley; an MA from San Francisco State University; and an MFA from Brooklyn College, where she subsequently taught the MFA playwriting tutorials, among other courses. She has translated works of poetry and prose from the Spanish, and has taught theory and literature at universities throughout the United States. She is a full voting member of the Dramatists Guild of America.