About

BIO:

JAMI BRANDLI’s plays include Technicolor Life, S.O.E., M-Theory, ¡SOLDADERA!, Sisters Three, Through the Eye of a Needle, Medusa’s Song, O: A Rhapsody in Divorce, Visiting Hours, and BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!) which was named in the 2014 Kilroys List.  Her work has been produced/developed at New Dramatists,  New York Theatre Workshop, Launch Pad, The Women’s Voices Theater Festival, Chalk REP, Great Plains Theatre Conference, The Lark, among other venues.

Winner of John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award, Holland New Voices Award, Ashland New Plays Festival and Aurora Theatre Company's GAP Prize.  Finalist for the 2016 PEN Literary Award for Drama, Playwrights’ Center Core Writer Fellowship, Princess Grace Award and the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference; nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.  Her short works are published with TCG and Smith & Kraus.

Technicolor Life premiered as part of the 2015 Women’s Voices Theater Festival and received its Australian premiere in 2017. In 2018, BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!) received a joint-world premiere with Moxie Theatre (San Diego) and Promethean Theatre (Chicago), ending with Moving Arts’ production at Atwater Village Theatre in Los Angeles (LA Times Critic’s Choice and Ovation Recommended).  Through the Eye of a Needle (Ovation Recommended) received its world premiere at The Road Theatre (Los Angeles), March to May, 2018. Sisters Three received its world premiere with The Inkwell Theater (Los Angeles) in December through January 2019.  Jami is currently a 2019 Humanitas Prize PLAY LA playwright and has been commissioned to write her latest play, Visiting Hours.

A proud member of The Playwrights Union, the Antaeus Playwrights Lab, and The Dramatist Guild, Jami teaches dramatic writing at Lesley University's low-residency MFA program. She is represented by the Robert A Freedman Agency and MSW Media Management.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT:  

I am commited, now more than ever, to give voice to female protagonists. And I make no apologies for writing theatrical, complicated, sometimes messy and often times funny plays about women. I write about the universal matters of family, life and death. And I write about fate, myths and war, both the external war and internal war that women fight everyday. I write about how all these themes constrain women, and conversely, how they can break women free. My hope is to open some hearts and crack apart some skulls with my female narratives.

One of my big projects I am currently working on is a four play cycle where I am reclaiming Greek Classics and Myths and re-envisioning the female narratives from the female perspective. More specifically, I am setting these four reclaimed stories during the last half of the 20th century and first two decades of the 21st. The first play starts in 1960, titled BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!), where I reclaim the narratives of Clytemnestra, Medea, Antigone and Cassandra.  The remaining plays are: Medusa’s Song, which is about rape culture on college campuses; O: A Rhapsody in Divorce, where I reclaim the Odysseus myth and tell it as a woman going through a divorce as she goes on an epic couch-hopping journey; and Visiting Hours reclaims the incestuous relationship of Persephone and Hades in which Persephone’s journey is mainly set in a psychiatric care facility.

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