Deborah Artman
Deborah Artman (libretto) is a fiction writer, librettist, playwright and poet whose career has been defined by a restless urge to explore new forms and collaborate often with artists in other media. Most recently, she completed Acquanetta, a new opera with composer Michael Gordon, which premiered at Theater Aachen in Germany in June 2005, and directed The Pork Chop Wars, a “performance novel” by Laurie Carlos, presented by the University of Austin at Texas in September. Artman worked previously with Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe on the oratorio, Lost Objects, directed by Francois Girard in a beautiful, mythic staging that premiered at BAM’s Next Wave Festival last year. Past projects include Keeper, a choral piece by Wolfe (BAM, 2000), The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, a theater piece with puppet-artist/chanteuse Jenny Romaine (La MaMa, 2000) and, in 1997, Music for Gracious Living, a music-theater piece for actor and string quartet with music by Lang (Merkin Concert Hall). In the 1980s, Deborah worked on numerous theater projects in New York with performance artists Laurie Carlos, Jessica Hagedorn, Robbie McCauley, choreographer Jawole Zollar and others. Among her awards are a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction and fiction fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the MacDowell Colony. Her stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous national journals, including, most recently, the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Her CD Lost Objects is available through Atlantic Records/Teldec Classics. She is editor of the literary-theater-arts magazine, the Lincoln Center Theater Review. Currently, she is working on a novel to be published next year by Shaye Areheart Books, a division of Random House.