Please register at the bottom of this page.

ABOUT THE OPEN SEMINAR

In this TDM Open Seminar, director Tina Satter will discuss her recent production Is This a Room, hailed by the New York Times as a “sharp, blindingly polished slice of theater vérité,” and cited by the NY Times, New York and Time Out in their best-of lists for 2019. Is This a Room takes as its script the verbatim transcript of the FBI’s interrogation of whistle-blower Reality Winner, the 25 year old Air Force linguist who first exposed Russian interference into the 2016 elections, and is now serving a record prison sentence for the leaking of classified documents. Satter will discuss her impetus for the piece, her production techniques and the impact that her play has had on this still developing story.

ABOUT TINA SATTER

Tina is an Obie-winning writer and director for theater and film. She grew up in New Hampshire and is now based in New York City. With Half Straddle, she has written and directed 11 full-length plays, and re-imagined them for a range of spaces as they have toured to numerous theaters and festivals in the U.S. and internationally. 

Most recently she had her Off Broadway debut as conceiver and director of IS THIS A ROOM at the Vineyard Theatre in October 2019—which was named in the Top 10 Theater of 2019 by both Ben Brantley and Jesse Green in The New York Times. 

Tina has directed a number of shorter performance pieces, music videos, web series content, and has several film projects in development. She is a recipient of a 2019 Pew Fellowship, 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, a 2014 Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, and was named an Off-Off Broadway Innovator to Watch by Time Out New York.

She has taught and led workshops on writing, directing, and feminist approaches to art-making at schools that include Princeton University, New York University, Bowdoin College, Reed College, Sarah Lawrence College, Fordham University, and more. In 2015, she was the visiting playwriting professor at University of Michigan. Tina has been in residence at Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, LMCC, The Performing Garage, Kitchen L.A.B., MASS MoCA, and New Museum for Contemporary Art. She is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop. In 2017, she received a PANOS commission from Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal to write a play for teenagers, and worked with the Portugese directors on the translation and dramaturgy of her play, Small Breath. 

Tina attended Mac Wellman’s graduate playwriting program at Brooklyn College and received an M.A. from Reed College and a B.A. from Bowdoin College. Her first collection of plays, Seagull (Thinking of you), was published by 53rd State Press in 2014. The full text of Ghost Rings and a live vinyl recording were put out by 53rd State Press in 2016.