Discipline: Theatre – playwriting, Theatre – libretto

Chana Porter

Discipline: Theatre – playwriting, Theatre – libretto
Region: Brooklyn, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2017, 2021

Chana Porter is a writer and teacher living in Brooklyn. She was a nominee for the Susan Smith BlackBurn Prize in Playwriting for 2018, and her plays and performance pieces have been developed or produced at Playwrights Horizons, La MaMa, Cloud City, 3LD, Rattlestick Playwright’s Theatre, Cherry Lane, The Invisible Dog, Primary Stages, Movement Research, PS122, and The White Bear in London. Chana is the co-founder of the Octavia Project, a free summer program for Brooklyn teenage girls.

While in residence, Chana completed a new play with music, We are Radios, which explores disability, queerness, the toxicity of the nuclear family, and the possibility of forgiveness. She also created a new draft of her speculative novella The Seep, a punk utopian twist on Invasion of the Body Snatchers to be published by Soho Press in the fall of 2019. Her Play LEAP AND THE NET WILL APPEAR, directed by Tara Ahmadinejad, premiered at Catastrophic Theater in Houston, TX in February 2019.

Made at MacDowell

Fellow Works Supported by MacDowell

We are Radios (Play)

The Seep (Novella)

Studios

Veltin

Chana Porter worked in the Veltin studio.

Veltin Studio was donated by alumni of the Veltin School, a school for girls in New York with a highly respected visual arts department. As the plaque just outside the entrance attests, this studio was used by poet Edwin Arlington Robinson during most of the 24 summers he spent at MacDowell. Perhaps most famously, Thornton Wilder put the finishing…

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