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Suzan-Lori Parks selected by MIT to receive
$70K McDermott Award for innovation in the arts

"Her dislocating stage devices, stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous."
--Time Magazine

Cambridge, MA...Award-winning American playwright and screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks has been awarded the 2006-07 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts by the Council for the Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Established in 1974, the McDermott Award in the Arts is given annually to a distinguished artist recognized for excellence and innovation in his/her field.

Parks will be presented with the $70,000 award at the annual meeting of Council for the Arts on Friday, Oct. 27 at a luncheon at the MIT Museum.

While on campus, Parks will read and discuss her work on Thursday, Oct. 26, at 7 p.m. in Room 10-250 (enter at 77 Massachusetts Avenue). Event information: (617) 253-7894.

In conjunction with the McDermott Award, she will return to MIT in Spring 2007, as an artist-in-residence, working with students and faculty and making a public presentation (date TBA).

Parks was born in 1964 in Fort Knox, Kentucky and went to high school in West Germany. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Mount Holyoke College in 1985 with a B.A. in English and German literature. As a student at Mount Holyoke, Parks took a writing class with Five Colleges faculty member James Baldwin, who called her "an utterly astounding and beautiful creature who may become one of the most valuable artists of our time." At his behest, she began to write plays. Her play, "Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom" won the 1989-1990 Obie Award for Best New American Play, and "Venus" (about a woman from Africa who's exhibited as a sideshow attraction in 19th century Europe) won the 1995-1996 Obie Award for Playwriting.

In 2002, she became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for "Topdog/Underdog," a play about family identity, fraternal interdependence, and the struggles of everyday African American life.

"I like my audiences to think for themselves," she said in a December 2005 interview for the Syracuse Post Standard. "This is America, after all. It's a free country, for the next 10 minutes. I enjoy hearing what my audiences think. That's the whole joy of art."

In November 2002, Parks sat down and committed to writing a play a day for the next 365 days. The world premiere of this play cycle will be performed in major cities and communities around the country as a yearlong national festival. From November 13, 2006 to November 12, 2007, her "365 Plays/365 Days" project will be presented in simultaneous and separate performances by over 600 theaters in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Washington D.C., Chicago, Minneapolis, Texas, the Southeast, and university campuses, creating the largest theater collaboration in US history.

Parks' previous plays include "The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World," The America Play" (the opening scene of which inspired "Topdog/Underdog"), and "In The Blood" (2000 Pulitzer prize nominee), originally titled "Fucking A," a retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel "The Scarlet Letter."

Parks wrote her first screenplay for "Girl 6," a 1996 film directed by Spike Lee. She later wrote the teleplay for the 2005 film "Their Eyes Were Watching God," based on the novel by Zora Neale Hurston, and co-wrote the film "The Great Debaters." She has also authored the novel "Getting Mother's Body" and the radio plays "Locomotive," "Third Kingdom," and "Pickling."

Her other awards include the Whiting Writers' Award in 1992, the Guggenheim Fellowship Playwriting in 2000, and the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001.

The Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts
MIT's Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts is among the country's most esteemed arts awards, recognizing one artist each year for the highest standard of creative achievement in his/her field. Established to honor Eugene McDermott, founder of Texas Instruments and long-time friend and benefactor to MIT, the award was created by the Council for the Arts at MIT in 1974, and further endowed by Eugene's wife, Margaret. Since its inception, the Council has given the award to 31 individuals producing creative work in the performing, visual and media arts, as well as authors, art historians and patrons of the arts. The award is bestowed with a $70,000 prize, which is considered an investment in the individual's future creative work.

Past recipients of the award have included engineer/architect Santiago Calatrava, filmmaker Isaac Julien, interdisciplinary artists-architects Diller + Scofidio, photographer Jeff Wall, composer Tan Dun and sculptor Henry Moore. Each recipient travels to MIT to accept the award and to work with students and faculty as a visiting artist.

The Council for the Arts at MIT
The Council for the Arts at MIT is a volunteer group of alumni and friends established to support the visual, literary and performing arts at MIT. Since its founding in 1972 by MIT President Jerome B. Wiesner, the Council for the Arts has worked to "to foster the arts at MIT...[and]... to act as a catalyst for the development of a broadly based, highly participatory program in the arts." Appointed by the President of MIT to three-year terms, Council members serve as advocates and advisors to MIT's Associate Provost.

Parks' October 26 presentation at MIT is sponsored by MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and the Angus N. McDonald Fund, with additional support from the MIT Literature Section, Program in Women's Studies, Office of the Associate Provost, Campus Committee on Race Relations, Theater Arts Section, the DeFlorez Fund, and the Council for the Arts at MIT.

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