15 Facts About Karen Malpede

Karen Malpede is an American playwright and director whose work reflects an ongoing interest in social justice issues.

Karen Malpede is a co-founder of the Theater Three Collaborative in New York City, and teaches theater and environmental justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Karen Malpede is the editor of the notable anthology, Women in Theater: Compassion and Hope.

Karen Malpede was born, a fraternal twin, in 1945, on Sheppard Air Force Base, in Wichita Falls, TX, to a Jewish mother and an Italian-American father.

Karen Malpede graduated from New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, IL.

Karen Malpede earned a Bachelor of Science degree with Honors at the University of Wisconsin and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Theater at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Karen Malpede holds a Clinical Training Certificate from the International Trauma Studies Program, and for many years was a member of Robert Jay Lifton's Center on Violence and Human Survival.

Karen Malpede was a cofounder of the Women's Salon for Literature, a monthly event featuring the leading writers of the feminist movement, and where her second play Rebecca received its first public reading, and has had 22 plays produced as of 2020.

Karen Malpede's most recently produced play Other Than We, is a utopic-dystopic cli-fi fantasy.

In 1977, Karen Malpede co-founded New Cycle Theater, with Burl Hash, a free, loft theater in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which later became affiliated with the early Arts at St Ann's.

Karen Malpede's first book, People's Theater in Amerika, a history of radical theater in the United States from 1929 to 1972, was a seminal study and brought her into contact with people who become mentors and early supporters of her plays, Joseph Chaikin, founder of the Open Theater, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina, co-founders of The Living Theatre, and lifelong friends.

Karen Malpede's second book, Three Works by the Open Theater, a collaboration with Chakin, published in 1974, was a seminal study of the influential, experimental theater company.

Karen Malpede has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, and her productions are regularly reviewed in periodicals such as American Theatre and the New York Times.

Karen Malpede is currently at work on an international collaboration with Persona Theater, Athens, for the YouTube staging of her short play Troy Too about COVID-19, the Climate Crisis and Racism; the script will be published in the forthcoming Staging 21st Century Tragedies.

Karen Malpede is the mother of a daughter, Carrie Sophia, and the grandmother of two.