Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.

SibylKempson's plays have been presented in the United States, Germany,and Norway. She launched the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. in 2015at the Martin E. Segal Center at the City University of New York. The company’sinaugural production, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, premiered at AbronsArts Center in NYC the same year. 12 Shouts to the Ten ForgottenHeavens, a 3-year cycle of rituals for the Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, began on the Vernal Equinox in March 2016, and recurred on everySolstice and Equinox through December 2018. Other recent projects include true pearl, a new opera with David Lang for theIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and Sasquatch Rituals atThe Kitchen in NYC. Both premiered in 2018. Kempson is the recipient of a2018 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for AmericanPlaywright at Mid-Career, for writers working indisputably at the highest levelof achievement, specifically honoring “her fine craft, intertextual approach,and her body of work including Crime or Emergency and Let Us Now Praise SusanSontag.” She is also a 2014 USA Artists Rockefeller Fellow anda 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellow. With New York Theatre Workshop and director Sarah Benson, she received a 2013Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Commission for Kyckling and Screaming (atranslation/adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck), a2013-14 McKnight National Residency and Commission for a new play The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.,and a Frederick Loewe Award for Musical Theater for its songs. Kempson is a NewDramatists/Full Stage USA commission for a devised piece entitled From The Pig Pile: The Requisite Gesture(s) of Narrow Approach,and a National Presenters Network Creation Fund Award for the same project. Hersecond collaboration with David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group, I Understand Everything Better, received a BessieAward for Outstanding Production in 2015. Her work has been funded by theJerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Foundation for ContemporaryArt, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, of which she is a fellow. WithElevator Repair Service Theater Company, she received a MAP Fund grant for Fondly, Collette Richland at New York Theatre Workshop in 2015. She is a four-time Mondo Cane! commissionee at Dixon Place in NYC. As a performer Kempson touredinternationally with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, New York City Players andElevator Repair Service from 2000 – 2011.

"Riveting...Kempson’s feminist politics are provocative, as is the way the play’s structure enacts a central theme of “Frankenstein” itself. Dr. Frankenstein created the monster, Shelley created Frankenstein, and Kempson re-creates Shelley out of a mishmash of details, some real, but many fictional."