Photography by Peter W. Slattery
Cassandra Lewis is an award-winning writer. She has contributed to 10 books and several literary journals.
Her plays have been performed in London, Dublin, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and published in numerous Best Of anthologies.
Cassandra was recently described as “[one] of our finest playwrights” by Lawrence Harbison, editor and columnist who was in charge of new play acquisitions at Samuel French for over thirty years and a former member of the Drama Desk Nominating Committee and Outer Critics Circle.
Notable book publications: Literacy Is Power. Lewis was commissioned to write The NYC K-12 Resource Guide: RRR You Ready? that is available on the NYC.gov website. Two monologues from American Lullaby have been published by Smith & Kraus in The Best Men’s Stage Monologues and Scenes 2012 and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues and Scenes 2012. Smith & Kraus also published Waiting for a Fix in The Best 10-Minute Plays 2011; Marked was published in The Best Plays From The Strawberry One-Act Festival Anthology and The Bay Area One Act Festival Anthology. A monologue from Transference was published by International Centre for Women Playwrights in Mother/Daughter Monologues Volume 1: Babes and Beginnings and Editions Bibliotekos published an excerpt from Migrations in Common Boundary.
Other publishing credits include: Boston Literary Magazine, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fractured West, HeadStuff, Weave Magazine, The Dirty Goat, Apparatus Magazine, Annalemma, On The Premises, and she has received numerous reporting credits in the Village Voice.
Cassandra earned an MA and an MFA in Writing from New College of California and a BA in Psychology from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. She has also studied at The Barrow Group, The Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York, The Studio Theatre in Washington DC, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and The Ballet Academy of Northern Virginia.
In 2006 Cassandra completed The University of Iowa’s Irish Writing Program in Dublin, Ireland. Her play, Two Women On The Shore, which was inspired by the Edvard Munch woodcut prints of the same title, was selected for the Play Lab at The Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska in 2009 and was given a full production at the conference in 2010. She studied under Marsha Norman at the Southampton Playwriting Conference in 2010, where she received the Southampton Playwriting Award. She was selected to participate in the Kennedy Center Summer Playwriting Intensive in 2011 and Donald Margulies’ workshop at Yale University Writers’ Conference in 2013, though she was unable to attend.
Day jobs that have inspired and informed her writing include her work with a Juilliard-trained Hollywood actor, people incarcerated in a maximum security prison, those in recovery, people experiencing housing insecurity, and other trauma survivors.
She is a member of The Dramatists Guild and PEN USA.
For more information, please visit: www.CassandraLewis.com.