Lydia Stryk was born in DeKalb, Illinois, birthplace of barbed wire. She grew up between DeKalb and London, England, and as a child also lived in Japan where she studied Kabuki and performed on the stage, and in Iran. After high school, she trained to be an actress at the Drama Centre, London--a career she pursued in New York for exactly one year before going back to school to study history, education and later, journalism. She has a BA in History from Hunter College, an MA in Journalism from NYU and a Ph.D. in Theatre from the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. Her dissertation, "Acting Hysteria: An Analysis of the Actress and her Part" was in part an attempt to understand why her own short-lived experience acting the woman's part on stage felt pathological. It was while interning at the weekly journal, The Nation, that she wrote a first play, coming full circle back to the theatre, but this time as a writer -- inspired by the feminist idea circulating at the time that women might have other stories to tell and other ways of telling them. She is the author of fifteen full-length plays and a few short ones. Some of the work is anthologized, and she is published by Broadway Play Publishing and translated into German by Per Lauke Verlag, Hamburg. Her plays have been seen at festivals around the United States and produced at, among others, Denver Center Theatre, Perseverance Theatre, Alaska, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Victory Gardens, HB Studios, Diverse City Theater Company, Stageworks/Hudson, The Contemporary American Theatre Festival, and in Germany at Schauspiel Essen, Theaterhaus Stuttgart and the English Theater Berlin. She has been commissioned by Pittsburgh Public Theatre and Geva Theatre, Rochester and is the recipient of a Berrilla Kerr Playwright Award. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. Her latest play, An Accident, which grew out of her own experience in a serious traffic accident will have its premiere at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in the spring of 2010. She lives between Berlin and New York teaching and editing and struggling with the art of growing things in her Berlin allotment garden.

headshot photo: nancy barnicle