Saviana Stănescu


Saviana Stănescu, Romania) is a Romanian-American award-winning playwright, ARTivist, and poet based in New York/Ithaca. Hailed as one of the most exciting voices to have emerged in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Saviana has received numerous accolades for her work, including the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Script and the Best Romanian Play of the Year UNITER Award . She has been inducted into the Indie Theater Hall of Fame and was named the Indie Theater Person of the Year in 2010.
After protesting in the streets as a student at the Romanian Revolution in 1989, Saviana worked in the newly created Free Press as a cultural journalist at the daily newspaper Adevarul, a contributor to Raido Free Europe, and a talk-show host for TVR International . Her revolutionary spirit inspires all her theatrical and literary work.
Saviana's cutting-edge plays have been developed/produced at Women's Project, La MaMa, 59E59, New York Theatre Workshop, EST, HERE, New Georges, Lark, Cherry, Civic Ensemble, Teatro La Capilla, and Teatrul Odeon, just to name a few. She has also served as the NYSCA playwright-in-residence for Women's Project, writer-in-residence of East Coast Artists, and Director of International Exchange for The Lark Play Development Center in New York. Her US plays include ', ', , Useless, Toys, For a Barbarian Woman, Lenin's Shoe, Waxing West, What Happens Next, Bee Trapped Inside a Window, and Zebra 2.0.
As a Fulbright fellow, she studied at NYU Tisch – receiving her MA in Performance Studies and an MFA in Dramatic Writing. Her PhD is in Theatre from the National University for Theatre&Film in Bucharest, Romania. Dr. Stănescu is also a celebrated professor and has taught Playwriting and Contemporary Theatre/Drama at NYU Tisch, Strasberg Institute for Theatre&Film, ESPa Primary Stages, and Fordham University. Currently, she works as a tenured Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at Ithaca College.

Poetry and plays