Tina Satter is a New York-based playwright and director whose experimental theater productions reflect diverse textual, formal, and aesthetic influences to illuminate the stories of female and queer characters. Though her plays center female and LGBTQ characters, Satter points out that her work aims to portray people of “various gender and sexual identities [who] are struggling, working, succeeding, loving, and being loved in the world, not because of their identity, but because they are alive.” Her most recent work, Is This A Room: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription, is a word-for-word staging of the FBI’s interrogation of a former American intelligence specialist charged with leaking classified information. As artistic director of Half Straddle, an Obie Award-winning theater company based in Brooklyn, Satter has created ten original full-length plays, which have toured nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award and a 2014 Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, and she was named an Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch by Time Out New York. She holds an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College.
Satter’s interest in living and working in Philadelphia as a Pew Fellow-in-Residence stems from her past interactions with the city’s creative communities and performance presenters such as FringeArts, which has presented three of her plays. During her residency, she plans to connect with LGBTQ organizations, as well as collaborate with Philadelphia artists, to develop a new work that explores how kinship and community are formed among aging queer, female-identified people.
