DOMINIQUE CIERI is a playwright, master teaching artist, and member of the Dramatists Guild. She is the recipient of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Playwriting Fellowship 2003, and 2009. A graduate of Rose Bruford College in Kent, England, and the recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor’s Medal of Excellence for Scholarship and Creative Activities. Ms. Cieri holds an MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College, Vermont. Ms. Cieri’s plays have been produced and developed in New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore. Her Essays on Arts and Education have been published in the New York Times, and Teaching Artist Journal. Dominique teaches the adaptation of nonfiction based on the Holocaust for the stage at...
DOMINIQUE CIERI is a playwright, master teaching artist, and member of the Dramatists Guild. She is the recipient of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Playwriting Fellowship 2003, and 2009. A graduate of Rose Bruford College in Kent, England, and the recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor’s Medal of Excellence for Scholarship and Creative Activities. Ms. Cieri holds an MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College, Vermont. Ms. Cieri’s plays have been produced and developed in New Jersey, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore. Her Essays on Arts and Education have been published in the New York Times, and Teaching Artist Journal. Dominique teaches the adaptation of nonfiction based on the Holocaust for the stage at Yavneh Academy in New Jersey where she also developed teaching curriculum and has adapted 24 plays based on Holocaust survivor stories, including a Zoom production of the 2020 Holocaust play. The scope of Dominique’s work has touched on a wide variety of populations, including boys at risk in juvenile justice programs as well as 17 years of workshops for artists and educators for aTi, and also taught playwriting at Drew University 2018-19. Dominique is an inaugural member of the Women’s Playwrights Circle @ Speranza, 2021-22.
PLAYS:
Pitz & Joe: Full Length.
- Philadelphia Theatre Company (workshop)
- Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, MA (workshop)
- GeVa Theatre, Rochester, NY (world premiere)
- Arizona Repertory Theatre, Tucson, AZ (staged reading)
- Hudson Theatre, Los Angeles (production)
- The Redhen, Chicago, IL (production)
- National Head Injury Foundation (presentation in Washington, DC)
- Albany New York National Head Injury Foundation (presentation)
For Dear Life: Full Length
- Finalist for Charlotte New Plays Festival, Charlotte, NC
- Jean Cocteau Repertory Company (staged reading)
- Finalist for Shenan Arts Fellowship, VA
Last Kiss: Full Length
- Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York, NY (reading in Octoberfest Festival)
& Summer Fest, Lexington Center for the Arts
- Centenary Stage’s Women Playwrights Series, Hackettstown, NJ
- North Carolina’s Festival of New Works, Davidson College
- Finalist for Shenan Arts Fellowship, VA
Count Down: Full Length
- The Strand Theatre Company, Baltimore, 2018 (production)
- Women’s Voices Theatre Festival, 2018
- Puffin Cultural Forum, Teaneck, New Jersey (production)
- Produced by Jane Dubin. Bank Street Theatre, New York City (production)
- Finalist for Playwrights First Award, The National Arts Club, NY
Safe: Full Length
- Writers Theatre of New Jersey, Madison, NJ (Forum Reading Series)
The Baby Killer Play: or Nothing But A Good Mother: Full Length
- Through a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Puffin Foundation, Women Playwrights Project, Writers Theatre of New Jersey, 2011-12. Forum Reading Series, 2013. --Semi-finalist, MultiStages New Works, 2013. Finalist, Downstage Left Playwrights Residency, 2014-15. Upcoming Reading, Speranzea Theatre, Fall Festival, 2015.
Medication: Full Length.
- A new play.
Grace Revised: A new play in Progress.
-To be Developed at Women’s Playwrights Circle @ Speranza, 2021-2022.
PLAY SYNOPSES
PITZ & JOE is a full-length about a sister who brings her brain damaged brother home to rehabilitate him. Everything about Joe has been compromised. He has suffered a profound loss of his life: memory, time, thought, speech, movement; all freedom. Within the harsh world of these huge limitations a different and intangible freedom emerges; that of shedding the past and living in the now. 2 Characters, 90 minutes.
FOR DEAR LIFE a full-length, is an ensemble piece about the 1979 Tehran hostage crisis, seen through the lens of a hostage who is trying to put his life back together. 10 Characters playing multiple parts. 2 hours.
LAST KISS a full-length. In the summer of 1967 when no young working-class man could feel safe and secure, unless he could find a way to evade the draft, a final push for Vietnam leaves a small river town in the Midwest without its young men. Two women and their daughters struggle to survive the loss of their men and the loss of innocence. 5 Characters (4 female, 1 male) 2 hours.
COUNT DOWN a full-length about the fragmented lives of abused girls, a teacher who tries to make them whole, and the inherent dissonance between the child welfare system and the reality of the girls who have no choice but to spend their childhood and adolescence in its care. 9 Characters (8 female, 1 male) 2 hours.
SAFE a full-length. Larkin is hip deep in trouble, about to turn 18, and precariously close to some serious jail time. With a mother who feels her son is safer locked up in facilities and a father who is living out of a truck, Larkin’s only savior may be Nitz, a kid Larkin finds sleeping in his bed when he returns from a stint at a facility. 7 Characters (1 doubling, 2 female, 4 male) 2 hours.
NOTHING BUT A GOOD MOTHER A young girl drops her 17-month old son into a River. The story leading up to this inexplicable act is set side-by-side with a forty-two-year-old woman who is desperately trying to have her first child, and Margaret Sanger’s crusade for birth control. 8 Characters (a full-length, 8-character ensemble, 2 hours)
MEDICATION When Colleen decides that her father, Justin, will return home to die, her childhood friend and once sister-in-law, Nora, arrives to help her with the difficult task of caring for Justin. From the moment Nora arrives the family is turned upside down, every step of the way, no one able to deal with the present and forever holding on to the past, yet trying desperately to keep it at bay. 6 Characters (a full-length, 2 hours)
GRACE REVISED An 89 year-old woman, nearing the end of her life, longs to revisit her life with her mother. A Three-Woman theatrical piece, spanning three generations of Italian women, written in free verse and prose, with GRACE as a banjo-playing storyteller. (A work in progress)
ONE ACTS
Blighted, By Satellite, Starting Today, Hallows’ Eve
PUBLICATIONS:
A Soldier of Service
- Teaching At-Risk, Juvenile Justice, and the Holocaust.
- Teaching Artist Journal, 2010, Vol. 8
Arts Advocacy
- Essay on the effects and necessity of arts education in public school education
- Published by New Jersey Theatre Alliance, April 2005
A Fiasco of Things
- Journals the process of working with abused and neglected girls
- Teaching Artist Journal, 2004, Vol. 2 Issue 2
From the Attic, To the Classroom, To the Stage: The Holocaust
- Textbook co-authored with Gabriella Weiss, Holocaust Historian.
- Published by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and The Bernard Stone Trust Fund, 2001
Desperate to Be Heard, Autobiographical lessons In Struggles, and Growing Up in the Inner City
- New York Times, City Section, 1995
AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS
Kennedy Center Very Special Arts with Writers Theatre of New Jersey
A Grant with Writers Theatre of New Jersey to work with Greenfields Group Residential incarcerated boys, playwriting, 2013-14. Winning Plays, VSA Playwright Discovery Competition 2103-14, 2016-17, 2017-18. Performed at Kennedy Center.
The Applause Awards
New Jersey Theatre Alliance, for artistry and dedication, 2010
Individual Playwriting Fellowship
New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, 2009
Rothschild Foundation
For research and documentation of Holocaust Survivors in Florence, Italy
With Florence International Theatre Company, 2009
Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence, the integration of academic and career achievement.