DGI INSTRUCTOR

Marsha Norman

Marsha Norman is the winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize, Blackburn Prize, Hull-Warriner, and Drama Desk Awards for her play ‘Night, Mother.  In 1992 she won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award  for her book for the Broadway musical, The Secret Garden.  She also wrote the book for the Broadway musical, The Color Purple, for which she also received a Tony nomination.  The Color Purple is currently in the third year of its national first-class tour.  Her new play, The Master Butcher's Singing Club, premiered at the Guthrie Theatre in the fall of 2010. She won a Peabody Award for her writing on the HBO television series, "In Treatment", starring Gabriel Byrne and Dianne Wiest.  Her most recent work  is the adaptation of The Trumpet of the Swan: A Novel Symphony for Actors and Orchestra, with music conducted and written by Jason Robert Brown.  The CD has been released by TRW and PS Classics..   Her other plays include Getting Out, for which she won the John Gassner Medallion and the American Theater Critics Association Citation, Third and Oak: The Laundromat, The Pool Hall, The Holdup, Traveler in the Dark, Sarah and Abraham, Loving Daniel Boone, Trudy Blue, and Last Dance.

Highlights

Council Member, Dramatists Guild of America  Marsha Norman has Grammy and Emmy nominations, as well as grants and awards from among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.  She has won the Margo Jones Award, and the Sidney Kingsley Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guild Hall Academy of Arts and Letters.  Ms. Norman is Co-Chair, with Christopher Durang, of the Playwriting Department of The Juilliard School. She writes and lectures frequently on the theatre and has 18 honorary degrees from American colleges and Universities. She was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers and serves on the Governing Board of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.  She sat on the Board Trustees of Agnes Scott College from 2001 - 2011, and was the Chair of the Academic Affairs committee from 2008 -  2011.  She is a former Vice-President of the Dramatists Guild of America. She is a native of Kentucky and currently lives in New York.