Saviana Stănescu

Hailed as one of the most exciting voices to have emerged in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Stănescu has received numerous accolades for her work, including the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Script (Waxing West) and the Best Romanian Play of the Year UNITER Award (Inflatable Apocalypse). She has been inducted into the Indie Theater Hall of Fame and was named the Indie Theater Person of the Year in 2010. Richard Schechner wrote on the cover of Stănescu's poetry book Diary of a Clone: "Saviana Stănescu is for and of the 21st century. She is hot and cool, witty and brave, sexy and weird, politically knowing and cynical. But most of all, she is an extraordinary writer."

As a Fulbright fellow, she studied at NYU Tisch, receiving her MA in Performance Studies and an MFA in Dramatic Writing. Her PhD is in Theatre from the National University for Theatre and Film (UNATC) in Bucharest, Romania. Stănescu is also a celebrated professor and has taught Playwriting and Contemporary Theatre/Drama at NYU Tisch (2004-2012), Strasberg Institute for Theatre&Film, ESPa Primary Stages, and Fordham University. Currently, she works as a tenured Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at Ithaca College.

Stănescu studied playwriting in English with David Harrower and Phyllis Nagy, at the Summer International Theatre Academy in Germany. Upon returning to Romania, she won the UNITER (Romanian Theatre Guild) Best Play of the Year Award for The Inflatable Apocalypse (Apocalipsa Gonflabilă). She recalls the moment as having "officially made [her] a playwright." The Inflatable Apocalypse was published in 2000.

Before immigrating to the United States, Stănescu made a name for herself in Romania as a poet and playwright: she published three books of poetry, Love on Barbed Wire (1994), Advice for Housewives and Muses (1996), and The Outcast (1997). Her dramatic poem Proscrisa/Outcast was produced in Paris at the Theatre Gérard Philipe and at Teatrul Dramatic Galați in 1998. Her first plays Infanta, User's Guide (Infanta, Mod de Intrebuințare) and Final Countdown (Numărătoarea Inversă) were produced in Romania between 1998–2001, announcing a cutting-edge playwright to watch.

After protesting in the streets as a student at the Romanian Revolution in 1989, Stănescu worked in the newly created Free Press as a cultural journalist at the daily newspaper Adevarul, a contributor to Radio Free Europe, and a talk-show host for TVR International (Necessary Polemics). Her revolutionary spirit inspires all her theatrical and literary work.

Saviana Stănescu (born 1967) is a Romanian-American award-winning playwright, ARTivist, and poet based in Ithaca, New York.