Lisa Loomer (born May 1, 1950) is an American playwright and screenwriter who has also worked as an actress and stand-up comic. She is best known for her play The Waiting Room (1994), in which three women from different time periods meet in a modern doctor's waiting room, each suffering from the effects of their various societies' cosmetic body modification practices (foot binding, corsetry, and breast implantation). She also co-wrote the screenplay for the film Girl Interrupted. Many of her plays deal with the experiences of Latinos and Hispanic-Americans, and with various aspects of contemporary family life. Though within Loomer's play The Waiting Room, it discusses issues such as body image, breast cancer, and non-Western medicine.
Video Lisa Loomer
Personal life
Lisa Loomer was born in New York and moved to Mexico with her family in her late teens. Loomer studied theatre at Brandeis University and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Loomer is married to composer and painter Joe Romano; they have one son, Marcello. For about 20 years Loomer lived in Los Angeles writing for Hollywood.
She is of mixed Spanish and Romanian ancestry.
Maps Lisa Loomer
Career
Lisa Loomer's career started after college performing off Broadway. After graduation she started working as an actress, after becoming frustrated by the lack of roles available to women, or Latinas, she starting writing her own monologues with the help of her mentor María Irene Fornés. Loomer started out by writing under the pseudonym Jane da Vinci. Loomer's early writings became several one woman shows that were performed in the early 1980's. Her first theatrical work was a collaborative effort titled A Crowd of Two and was produced by New York's Amerinca Plave Theatre. Loomer produced her one woman show All by Herselves, at Westside Arts Theater in New York. A, My Name is Still Alice, Premiered at Second Stage in New York City, and Loomer was a contributor.
Loomer is an alumna of the New Dramatists and was a 1985 playwright-in-residence at the Intar Theatre in New York City.
After the success of her play The Waiting Room Loomer was bombarded with offers to write, everything from sitcoms to articles. Loomer made two attempts to write Latino sitcoms. Gloria was about a Puerto Rican talk show host and East L.A. was set in an unemployment office. Loomer worked with Gabriel Garcia-Marquez on Looking for Angels, which was sponsored by Sundance in Cuba.
Loomer adapted Susanna Kaysen's memoir, Girl Interrupted, for Columbia Pictures. She wrote a screenplay for Fox 2000 and Winona Ryder, which was based on the book Dreaming.
Loomer's play Living out premiered in 2003 and was directed by her longtime collaborator Bill Rauch. The Mark Taper Forum commissioned Loomer to write Living Out.
Awards
Loomer has won the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award (in 1994 for The Waiting Room), the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award, a Back Stage West Garland Award for Playwriting (in 2003 for Living Out), the Imagen Award for positive portrayals of Latinos in all media, and American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg New Play Award (in 1995 for The Waiting Room and in 1999 for Expecting Isabel.) She was also the recipient of 2 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and one from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
List of works
Select plays
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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