TIRA PALMQUIST is known for plays that merge the personal, the political and the poetic. Her most produced play, Two Degrees, premiered at the Denver Center, and was subsequently produced by Tesseract Theater in St. Louis and Prime Productions at the Guthrie (among others).
Tira’s current projects include The Body’s Midnight, a play she worked on as the Featured Playwright at the 2021 Seven Devils New Play Conference and as the Travis Bogard Artist in Residence at the Tao House (Eugene O’Neill Foundation), and King Margaret, an adaptation of the Henry VI, which will have
a reading at OSF in July 2021.
Her play The Way North, an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Kilroys List, and was developed at the 2019 Ashland New Plays Festival and at the 2018 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference. It was also featured in the following festivals: The Festival of New American Plays (Phoenix Theater), the Human Rights New Works Festival (Red Mountain Theater), the Page-by-Page Festival (Pioneer Theater) and the Road Theater’s Summer New Works Festival. The Way North was a finalist for the 2018 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the 2018 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the 2019 Blue Ink Playwriting Award.
Among Tira’s commission projects are The Worth of Water (Clutch Productions’ equity showcase production in NYC in October, directed by Mélisa Annis) and Lower Depth Theater Ensemble’s commission Safe Harbor, a play about sex trafficking, which premiered in November in LA. Tira has also been commissioned to write new work for the UCI graduate acting students. Her play Hold Steady was workshopped at UCI in February 2019, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything was workshopped in February 2020, and in February 2021, The Last Time We Saw Madison was performed online with the more recent first-year grad actors.
Her other plays include Ten Mile Lake (Serenbe Playhouse), Age of Bees (Theatre at Monmouth, NYU Stella Adler Studio, MadLab Theater, Tesseract), And Then They Fell (MadLab, Brimmer Street, New York Film Academy) and This Floating World.
Two Degrees has been featured in numerous festivals (including the 11 th Annual Denver Center New Play Summit, the New American Voices festival in the UK, the Caltech 2014 Mach 33 Festival and the 2014 Great Plains Theater Conference) and had its World Premiere in the Denver Center’s 2016/17 Season.
Two Degrees was also listed in the Honorable Mention list for the 2016 Kilroys. Ten Mile Lake, which premiered in 2014 at Serenbe Playhouse just outside of Atlanta, GA, was developed and workshopped in 2012 at the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, and was a finalist for the 2015 Primus Prize.
Tira has taught creative writing at the Orange County School of the Arts, at Wesleyan University and at the University of California-Irvine. She is a member of the Playwrights Union, the Anteaus Theater’s Playwrights Lab and is a member of the Dramatists Guild. Her work as a director and dramaturg includes several seasons at the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, MadLab Theater’s Young Playwrights’ Program, Moving Arts Theater’s MADLAB series and the New Territories Playwriting Residency. More info at www.tirapalmquist.com.