Brighde Mullins

2001 Winner in

Drama

Brighde Mullins is a playwright and poet whose plays include Rare Bird (Pioneer Theatre Company); Those Who Can, Do (Clubbed Thumb); Monkey in the Middle (N.Y.U); Fire Eater (The Tristan Bates Theatre, London); Topographical Eden (the Magic); Increase (LaMaMa) and Pathological Venus (Ensemble Studio Theatre). Her awards include a Guggenheim Award and a United States Artists Fellowship. She has held residencies at Lincoln Center, New York Stage and Film, Mabou Mines (with Lee Breuer), and the Institute for Art and Civic Dialogue (with Anna Deavere Smith). She is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, and has been a Core Member of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. She has taught at Harvard University (where she was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer); Brown University; and at the California Institute of the Arts (where she was the Director of the MFA in Writing). She has taught and worked in grade schools in the Bronx and Harlem, as well as women’s prisons. For fifteen years she was the Director of the Readings in Contemporary Poetry Series at Dia Art Foundation, where she also designed, developed and initiated an Arts Education program. She was raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, and studied English and Theatre at the University of Nevada, and she holds M.F.A.s from the Yale School of Drama (Playwriting) and the Iowa Writers Workshop (Poetry).

Photo Credit:

Cam Sanders

Reviews & Praise

“And now for something completely unexpected: a comedy about the Irish potato famine with romantic lesbian under-tones . . . it's also a highly original, intriguingly quirky take on a well-trodden historical tragedy . . . On one level, Fire Eater is an odd-ball pastiche of famine-dramas; on another, it is a self-mocking account of those (lesbians, teetotal preachers, turncoats) left out of official histories. Altogether it's a weird, witty and sporadically wonderful new start for the [Tristan Bates Theatre].” —London Evening Standard

“Telling the story in multiple sound-bite scenes—some of alarming brevity—playwright Mullins displays a strong sense of characterization that makes all three protagonists convincingly real.” —Backstage [on Those Who Can, Do]

"Brighde Mullins' Water Stories is a stunning collection of poems, dangerous, difficult, and fiercely alive. These poems pull us down below the surface of things until we find ourselves almost intolerably submerged, then they release us to a life that is changed for having read them. She retrieves content from a line drawing snatched out of a dumpster, the deadly ennui of a lonely afternoon, a purple sequined blues singer, a family, her own, falling through letters, boxes, lakeweed and generations. Brighde Mullins' debut collection places her at the very forefront of the new voices in American poetry." —Sapphire