I am a writer and theatre artist based in Seattle, Washington, with liberal abscondings to New York, mostly, though I am planning on knocking about the world some more.
My plays have been performed in some fashion — usually readings but occasionally full productions -- at South Coast Rep, Live Girls! Theater, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Idaho, San Francisco Opera, Northwest Playwrights Alliance, A Contemporary Theatre, FringeACT, Richard Hugo House, Shoestring Radio Theatre, Jack Straw, New Waves Radio Theatre, and KUOW, to name a few. I have won many prizes and grants — some from the National Endowment for the Arts — have taught at all levels in many venues, and have about twenty works of art to my name. Literary work has been published in The Amherst Review, The North Carolina Review, and Dialogue, among others. Most of this stuff took place before 2010 when my parents started to get sick and pass away and my world exploded in the sort of free-floating midlife apocalypse familiar to anyone who has spent a few decades on the planet. Hence the need for a fresh start.
In the real world, I am a CNA (nurse’s aid) and have worked in both facility and home care settings. In my underfunded spare time, in addition to arts event reviews, I have some years playing at refitting an old sailboat as a way into writing some maritime characters, gadding about in online writing, and inching back toward performance art type stuff.
I hold a B.A. and M.A. from Brigham Young University, cum laude and with University Honors. I was the 1986 Parley P. Christensen Fellow (the top student in the English Department) and the 1985 Karl G. Maeser Scholar (the top student in the College of Humanities) at a university of 30,000 sober, hard-working young Mormons for whom “The Glory of God is Intelligence."
My play “Tea Party” will be performed at La Familia Repertory’s Series of Short Stories, November 22-24, 2024, in New York.
My New Play Exchange Profile can be found at: https://newplayexchange.org/users/73313/joann-farias
My sailboat refit blog can be found at http://www.friothusibu.com/
