Richard Foreman - Prizes and awards

Director, producer, and playwright, born in New York City, New York, USA. An avant-garde dramatist, he was the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in New York in 1968. He also designed sets for New York's Public Theatre, among others.

Richard Foreman (born in New York on 10 June 1937) is a playwright and avant-garde theater pioneer;

His work has been primarily done at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York, though he has gained acclaim as director for such productions as Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center and the premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks's "Venus" at the Public Theater.

Foreman's plays have been co-produced by such organizations as The New York Shakespeare Festival, La Mama Theatre, The Wooster Group and the Festival d'Autumn in Paris and the Vienna Festival. He has also directed and designed many classical productions with major theaters around the world including, The Threepenny Opera, The Golem and plays by Václav Havel, Botho Strauss, and Suzan-Lori Parks for The New York Shakespeare Festival, Die Fledermaus at the Paris Opera, Don Giovanni at the Opera de Lille, Philip Glass's Fall of the House of Usher at the American Repertory Theater and The Maggio Musicale in Florence, Woyzeck at Hartford Stage Company, Molière's Don Juan at the Guthrie Theater and The New York Shakespeare Festival, Kathy Acker's Birth of the Poet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the RO theater in Rotterdam, Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights at the Autumn Festivals in Berlin and Paris.

Seven collections of his plays have already been published, and books studying his work have been published in New York, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo.

Prizes and awards

2004 Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France

2001 PEN/Laura Pels Master American Playwright Award

1995-2000 MacArthur Fellowship

1996 Edwin Booth Award for Theatrical Achievement

1992 & 1995 NEA Playwriting Fellowship

1992 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature

1990 NEA Distinguished Artist Fellowship for Lifetime Achievement in Theater

1990 Ford Foundation play development grant for "Eddie Goes to Poetry City"

1974 Rockefeller Foundation Playwrights Grant

1972 Guggenheim for Playwriting

9 Village Voice "OBIEs", (including 3 for Best play, and one for Lifetime Achievement)