Playwright Penda Diouf is one of the leading voices in new dramatic writing. She is currently a member of the Ensemble Artistique de la Comédie de Valence and associated with the Centres Dramatiques Nationaux de Vire and Poitiers as well as the Scènes Nationales d’Evry-Courcouronnes and Poitiers. Since her very first play – Poussière – written at the age of 19, she has created a singular body of work, at the crossroads of the intimate and the political, arranging her pieces like a vast jigsaw puzzle in which fiction often plays hide-and-seek with autobiography. Translated into German, English, Armenian, Czech and Finnish, her texts deal with identity, oppression, injustice and colonisation, opening the way to an eco-feminist imagination where magic and the supernatural often intrude.
Before being staged or read, her plays – Poussière, La Grande Ourse, Le Symbole, Pistes… – won awards from reading committees including the Comédie-Française readers’ bureau, the Théâtre de la Tête Noire, the Comédie de Caen, À mots découverts… La Grande Ourse and Pistes… are published by Quartett. Two of her plays for young audiences – Le Blues des mots and L’Arbre – were published in 2022 in collections by Théâtrales jeunesse. She currently writes for Malou Vigier (Les Invisibles, an adaptation of the fairytale La petite Fille aux allumettes), François Ebouele (Harriet Tubman, passeuse de l’ombre), Lucie Berelowitsch (Sorcières – provisional title) Silvia Costa (Soeurs, nos forêts aussi ont des épines) and Remsi Al Khalisi (May Ayim). These plays will be premiered in 2024-2025, a season that will also see the double premiere of Pistes… in France and Canada.
In 2015, she co-founded with Anthony Thibault the label Jeunes textes en liberté, which aims to support contemporary playwrights and promote greater diversity of stories and performances on stage. She made the documentary Voies sensibles: l’art de marcher en Seine-Saint-Denis for France Culture and wrote songs for Fidel Fourneyron’s album Bengue, winner of the 2019 Victoire du jazz. She has benefited from writing residencies at the Institut français de Tunis, the Royal Court in London, the Villa Albertine in New York and the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. She worked for two seasons on the Opéra de ci de là programme at the Festival d’arts lyriques d’Aix en Provence.
She is a winner of the Mondes nouveaux scheme, for which she created La Nuit des reines at the Basilique de Saint-Denis in 2023, and was voted ‘new theatre talent 2023’ by the SACD. La Grande Ourse won the jury prize at the April text festival at the Théâtre de la Tête Noire in 2018, the Collidram 2021 prize and was a finalist for the Sony Labou Tansi prize in 2022. Pistes… was awarded the La Chartreuse reading committee prize, voted best radio drama in Germany in 2022 and broadcast on France Culture. Sip of Water was directed by Maëlle Dequiedt as part of the Lycéens citoyens programme run by the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, La Colline, Le Grand T and the Comédie de Reims.
CURRENTLY IN
Sip of water
