Awards & Accolades Include: 2 NEA Grants, Residency at Rockefeller Study Center (Bellagio, Italy), Israel Baran Award, TCG/Mellon Foundation “On the Road” Grant.

Paula Cizmar

Paula Cizmar is an award-winning playwright and librettist, whose work aims to explore untold stories and unheard voices to get at the beating heart of the world. Her plays have been produced at theaters all around the U.S., including Portland Stage, San Diego Rep, the Women’s Project, the Jungle Theatre, Cal Rep, and Playwrights Arena. Her audio play, The Vig (Inglewood 90303), was presented in series two of the Zip Code Plays, produced by Antaeus Theatre in 2021; it is available for listening via Apple podcasts. Her short plays Delivery and Underground were commissioned and produced by Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble in their nationwide virtual 2020 Pandemic Plays series.

Among her plays are works that focus on environmental justice, including The Chisera, which was performed at the Mach 33 Science Play Festival, and takes on the impact of climate change in the Eastern Sierra and the lives of the indigenous people of the area. Water Rites, a triptych of plays illuminating the past, present, and future of water shortages, was presented at USC’s Visions and Voices. She has also written short eco-plays, including Appealing for Climate Change Theatre Action 2019 and The Pageant for CCTA 2021. Her micro-opera, A Hole in the Sky (music comp. Guang Yang), offers a child’s vision of the environmental crisis. Her many other plays include: Along the River, Almost Winter (features a talking bear and is set in the California Gold Rush), Last Nights of Scheherazade (a woman escapes into stories to avoid the nightmare of her home life), and Antigone X (update of the Sophocles classic, set in a refugee camp along an unknown border - pub. No Passport Press).

Paula is one of the writers (w/ Anna Deavere Smith, Carol Mack, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Ruth Margraff & Susan Yankowitz) of the documentary play Seven, which tells the story of women human rights workers around the globe who risked their lives to campaign against trafficking, corruption, and domestic violence. The play has been produced in 30+ countries and translated into 22 languages. In early 2020, Seven was in the middle of a 27-city tour of the U.S., produced by LA Theatre Works, when the pandemic brought it to a halt. In the music world, she wrote the libretto for The Night Flight of Minerva’s Owl (music Guang Yang), which was the winner of the Music That Matters/Fight for the Right new opera program at Pittsburgh Festival Opera. A video version of the opening scene of Minerva’s Owl was presented at Thornton School of Music in 2021, with animation and puppetry. Her work-in-progress musical with composer Nathan Wang, Golden, was selected for the international Paderewski Cycle commission. Her one-act opera, Invisible (music Guang Yang) premiered in LA Opera’s Eurydice Found Festival in January 2020. Invisible was selected for Snapshot 2021, produced by West Edge Opera at the Bruns Amphitheatre in the Bay Area. Guang and Paula received a “Let’s Celebrate!” commission from White Snake Opera, and their piece, Firecrackers, will premiere at White Snake in Boston in 2022.

In addition to plays and music theatre, Paula generates opportunities for other writers by creating and producing theatre actions and events, including LA: At the Intersection, which was produced at the Natural History Museum in November 2019, and was part of LA’s contribution to the global Climate Change Theatre Action. A Hole in the Sky was performed at this event. Paula also works on nonfiction projects, including Sacrifice Zone: Los Angeles, a multimedia documentary theatre piece she created with Michael Bodie, Fran de Leon, and the community members of People Not Pozos (environmental justice project led by Hugo Garcia). The prototype of SZLA was presented at USC (funded by Arts in Action) in March 2021; the expanded version will be produced live and in-person in 2022. In 2021, Paula was selected to be one of the five inaugural members of the Playwrights Group at Boston Court Theatre, where her play Strawberry is being developed. She is also a member of the Antaeus Playwrights Lab. Paula is a board member and part of the creative team of the Institute for Theatre and Social Change at the University of Southern California, where she is an associate professor of theatre practice at their School of Dramatic Arts.