Playwright Susan Hansell began to write for the stage by constructing texts for dancers, choreographers, and performance artists, including herself. As a result, stylized movement and physical elements remain theatrical aspects in her plays, which include: the 10-minute A History, reviewed on NPX, podcast by Panglossian Productions, staged as a reading by the Alternative Theater Company, as a filmed zoom-streamed event by Spark Creative Works, included in American Blues Theater's (Chicago) 2022 RIPPED Festival, and published in The Courtship of Winds Special 2024 Election Issue (Winter 2025); the new full-length absurdist comedy An Ocean of Bees, seen in an early cold reading at The Tank (NYC) as presented by The Bechdel Group then selected for development by The Bridge Initiative and staged as a reading at the Bechdel Festival 2.0 (Phoenix); and the new historically-driven three-act drama At Dawn with the Rain and the Stars, from which the first act Who Will Witness for the Witness was staged as a reading by the Shattered Glass Project (Seattle), reviewed on NPX, and produced in 2022 by The St. Louis Actors’ Studio, and, from which the second act Every Concentrated Fragment was showcased at the 2017 William Inge Festival, produced by the Tucson Players in 2018, by the Bay Area Women’s History Festival in January-February 2020, and virtually in August 2021 by the Femme Fatale Festival, Washington DC.

Born Susan Hansell Smuck in Stockton CA, Susan Hansell (she/her) is also a USMS All-Time All-American swimmer. During her high school years, she became the first swimmer from Sonoma County to qualify for US Senior Nationals and she swam in national and international competition representing Petaluma Swim Club. She also wrote poetry and fiction from childhood, when, unbeknownst to her, she won a school creative writing contest judged by independent writers but invalidated by an AP English teacher at her public school because she was not in that AP English teacher's class. This incident was told to her years later by her mother after she received her first New York City production. She has lived and traveled in various parts of North and Central America, including ten years in NYC, during which time she wrote plays freely-adapted from the classics, including My Medea, (a Best American Short Plays series selection), and where she was commissioned to write American Rose (a finalist for the Jane Chambers National Playwriting Award), produced at The Ohio NYC. Her ancestry is Scotch-Irish-British Isles, French-German, Ashkenazi Jewish (Polish-Ukrainian), Scandinavian-Finnish, Indigenous American, and North African.

A Day In, Affair on the Air, Drop It, Don't, and Trolls (all early/student solo performance works shown at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at The Harold Clurman NYC, with two appearing in Heinemann’s More Monologues for Women by Women) can be seen on YouTube. She holds a BA with high honors from UC Berkeley; an MA from San Francisco State University; and an MFA from CUNY Brooklyn College, where she subsequently taught the MFA playwriting tutorials, among other courses. She has translated works of poetry and prose from the Spanish, and has taught theory and literature at universities throughout the United States. She is a full voting member of the Dramatists Guild of America.

CONTACT

Email Susan Hansell directly at: <susan.hansell@gmail.com>.

RESUME