Biography of Barbara Lhota

Barbara Lhota is an award-winning playwright as well as a screenwriter. 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 was awarded the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Award for playwriting for Hanging by a Thread at the Crawford Theater at Brandeis University. Green Skin, her collaboration with Ira Brodsky, was staged at the Producers' Club with Theatre Asylum in New York. Most recently Barbara is the proud winner of the Babes with Blades' international playwriting competition Joining Sword and Pen for her play Los Desaparecidos: The Vanished. Her plays have been produced at various theaters and universities across the country including the Ritz Theater in New Jersey, the American Stage Festival in New Hampshire, the New England Theater Conference, and the Wang Center in Boston. In addition, her shows have been performed at several off-off Broadway Theaters including Tribeca Lab, Madison Avenue Theater, Love Creek Productions at the Nat Horne Theatre and the Phil Bosakowski Theater. 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 has had the opportunity to see Strangers and Romance, Family Portrait, Third Person , A Good Solid Home, Without You, Acceptance Letter, The Good Son, Flyin' High, Morbid Curiosity, Personal Penchants, and The Nerdy Girl and the Intergalactic Dog produced. She has had productions or workshops with various Chicago companies which include Artistic Home, Stage Left, Women's Theatre Alliance, Griffin Theater, Circle Theatre Company, Theatre of Western Springs, Jupiter Theater, Bailiwick Repertory Theatre, Stockyards Theater, Naked Earth, Rascal Children's Theater, Symposium, Camenae Ensemble, and Theatre of Western Springs. Recently Ira and Barbara's screenplay, The Long Shot, was optioned E. Klaviter Productions, a writer and researcher on the hit show Grey's Anatomy. Barbara's plays, Strangers and Romance, can be found in Smith and Kraus' Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2001 and two of her monologues are in The Best Male Monologues of 2001. She is the co-author of four collections of short play published by Smith and Kraus and entitled Forensics Series Volume 1-4. If you would like to contact Barbara, you can e-mail her at Blhota@aol.com.