Biography of Rochelle Owens

A central figure in the international avant-garde for over thirty-five years, Rochelle Owens is a playwright, poet, translator, and video artist. She is the author of four collections of plays, Futz and What Came After, The Karl Marx Play and Others, Futz and Who Do You Want Peire Vidal?, and more recently Plays by Rochelle Owens (Broadway Play Publishing, Inc.). She also edited Spontaneous Combustion: Eight New American Plays. She has published sixteen books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems 1961-1996 and Luca, Discourse on Life and Death. A pioneer in the experimental Off-Off Broadway theatre movement, she is widely known as one of the most innovative and controversial writers of her generation, whose groundbreaking work has influenced subsequent experimental playwrights. Since its first publication in 1961, her play Futz, has become a classic of the American avant-garde theatre and an international success. It was originally produced by Ellen Stewart at LaMama Experimental Theater Club, where it was directed by Tom OHorgan and performed by the LaMama Troupe in 1967 and was made into a film, which has attained a cult following, in 1969. Her plays have been presented worldwide and in festivals in Edinburgh, Avignon, Paris, and Berlin, and have been translated into various languages. . A French language production of Three Front was produced by France-Culture and broadcast on Radio France. Owens has been a participant in the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poésie, and has translated Liliane Atlans novel Les passants, The Passersby (Henry Holt, 1989). A recipient of five Village Voice Obie awards and honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle, she has held fellowships from the NEA, Ford, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and numerous other foundations. A member of the Dramatists Guild, she has taught at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Oklahoma and has held residencies at Brown University and the university of Southwestern Louisiana State. She has lectured and read widely in the United States and Europe.

"Rochelle Owens' risk-taking is more radical in certain respects than Beckett or Shepard." C W E Bigsby, Modern American Drama
"The genius of Owens' work lies not in ideological commitments but in her access to the subconscious. One of our most courageous and insightful artists. . .and perhaps the most profound tragic playwright in the American theater." Village Voice