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Chris White

Associate Professor of English, Richard W. Peck Professor of Creative Writing, and Coordinator of Film Studies

Chris White Chris White is a playwright, screenwriter and fiction writer, teaching playwriting and screenwriting courses through the EnglishDepartment as well as topics courses in dramatic literature. Much of her writing centers on women's and gender issues. Professor White received a BA in Theatre from the University of Colorado in Boulder, additional training at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Los Angeles, and earned a MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her plays have been produced in New York City, Edinburgh, Scotland, Washington D.C., Virginia, Colorado, and Indiana.

Her play, Rhythms (an examination of seven seemingly disparate female characters who find patterns of intimate connection),was awarded the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play (the Charles MacArthur Award); her play, Sin Eater (which is set in a women's self defense class), was commissioned by Hollins University, earned Honorable Mention in the American College Theatre Festival, and has been adapted into a screenplay. Her play, Mud Lotus, which she is currently adapting for film, focuses on a young girl who would seem to be the reincarnation of a Buddhist master on a farm in North Carolina. (The play version was finalist for the O’Neill Theatre Conference and received a Basile Award for Emerging Indiana Playwrights.) White’s Two-Character Play, a meta-theatrical 50-minute drama about a female college student at war with self-image and self-mutilation was published in 2011 by Allyn & Bacon as a part of Explore Theatre: A Backstage Pass (a digital introduction to theatre textbook). Her screenplay, Weasel in the Icebox, which made first cut at the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab, is a dark comedy that explores the loss of fundamental freedoms in America through issues of reproductive rights.  White recently finished a novel, The Last Bird: The Life List of Adrian Mandrake, about an anesthesiologist/birder willing to do anything to pursue the probably extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker and escape his past.