C. Denby Swanson (Playwright) has had ten works premiered by The Drilling Company, seven of which have been published. Notable among them is "Atomic Farmgirl" (2007), based on the memoir of the same name by Teri Hein, a woman who grew up in the radioactive shadow of Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, watching her father, friends and neighbors suffer disturbingly high levels of thyroid, brain and other cancers. She graduated from Smith College, the National Theatre Institute, and the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers, where she was a fellow in playwriting and screenwriting. She has been a Jerome Fellow, a William Inge Playwright in Residence and a McKnight Advancement Grant recipient. Her work has been commissioned by the Guthrie Theater, 15 Head Theatre Lab (in Minneapolis), Macalester College (in St. Paul), and The Drilling Company and featured in the Southern Playwrights Festival, the Women Playwrights Project, the Lark Theater’s Playwrights Week, PlayLabs, the WPA Festival at Salvage Vanguard, JAW: A Playwrights Festival at Portland Center Stage, and multiple residencies at New York Stage & Film. She won a 2008 Susan Smith Blackburn Special Prize for her short play "The Potato Feast," which was also nominated for a 2008 New York Innovative Theater Award. Her blues play, Blue Monday," was developed at ZACH Theatre Center in Austin as part of the NEA/TCG National Theater Residency Program for Playwrights. She is a former Artistic Director of Austin Script Works and on the faculty at Southwestern University in Texas. Her work is published by Smith & Kraus, Heinemann, and Playscripts, Inc…..(Drilling Company, New York website)

 

For an interview with the playwright, go to: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/03/theater/the-norwegians-busting-outta-permafrost-with-c-denby-swanson