Lynne Conner

Lynne Conner is Chair and a professor in the Department of Theatre. She is a theater and dance historian, cultural policy theorist and playwright. Her publications include the books Audience Engagement and the Role of Arts Talk in the Digital Era (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), Pittsburgh in Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theater(University of Pittsburgh Press 2007), In the Garden of Live Flowers, co-authored with Attilio Favorini (Dramatic Publishing Company 2003), Spreading the Gospel of the Modern Dance: Newspaper Dance Criticism in the United States, 1850-1935 (University of Pittsburgh Press 1997), and the monograph Project Brief:  The Heinz Endowments’ Arts Experience Initiative (The Heinz Endowments 2008). She is currently co-editor for the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts, a major reference work covering the field of audience research (forthcoming in 2021). Conner has also published chapters, articles, and essays in Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life (Routledge), l’ordinaires des Amerique, Crucibles of Crisis (University of Michigan Press), Theatre Annual, Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, The International Dictionary of Modern Dance, Metamorphosis, High Performance, Theatre Studies, Grantmakers in the Arts Reader and numerous newspapers.

Lynne’s most recent play, THE MOTHER, is a 2018 and 2019 Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center National Playwright’s Conference Semi-finalist. THE MOTHER will receive its world premiere at Dramatic Repertory Theatre in Portland, Maine in March 2020. With choreographer Stephanie Martinez, Lynne devised and directed UNSEX ME HERE, a 45-minute ballet based on four Shakespeare plays commissioned by the Charlotte Ballet as part of the 2019 Innovative Works series. The piece has been performed at the Charlotte Ballet Center for Dance (January-February 2019) and the Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater (July 2019).  Her play about Rachel Carson, IN THE GARDEN OF LIVE FLOWERS (co-written with Attilio Favorini), won the 2002 Kennedy Center National Playwriting Award and an honorable mention prize in the 2002 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award contest and is published by Dramatic Publishing Company. AMERICAN HUMBUG—a political satire based on P.T. Barnum, George W. Bush and the “New American Century” ideology—received a Creative Heights grant award from the Heinz Endowments in 2007 and was produced by the Three Rivers Arts Festival (AEA special contract). In January 2013 Conner was awarded the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Region I award for Excellence for her original adaptation of LYSISTRATA at Colby College. She served as the resident playwright for Carnegie Mellon University’s Interactive Theatre Company, a professional troupe performing scripts on workplace and campus life issues, for which she received a Pennsylvania Economy League Learning and Development Award and a College and University Professional Association Innovation Award. As the founding director and resident playwright of the Heinz History Center’s Stages in History professional theatre company from 1996 to 1999, she wrote over fifty one-act plays, monologues and short scenes and received the Pennsylvania Federation of Museums Award of Merit/Outstanding Museum Programs in May 2000. Conner served as the Resident Dramaturg at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre and the Literary Manager at City Theatre (Pittsburgh). Lynne’s plays and adaptations have been produced at: Theatre Project (Brunswick, Maine), Main Street Theatre (Houston), Theatre-Hikes (Chicago), the Actors’ Guild of Lexington (Kentucky), Gemini Theatre (Pittsburgh), Prime Stage (Pittsburgh), Carnegie Mellon University, Smith College, William and Mary College, Loyola Marymount, Slippery Rock University, Point Park University and the University of Pittsburgh Repertory Theatre (among others).