Donna Di Novelli

Donna Di Novelli has a writing career that spans film, opera, music-theater and stage. A multi-genre artist, Di Novelli attended the 2018 Sundance Film Festival as the co-writer with director Josephine Decker of the Indie narrative feature Madeline's Madeline, described as a "mind-scrambling masterpiece” and chosen as one of the top ten films of the decade by The New Yorker. The movie, starring Miranda July, Molly Parker and introducing Helena Howard is distributed by Oscilloscope Films and available on digital platforms. She conceived and wrote The Good Swimmer, a Pop Requiem with Heidi Rodewald (Passing Strange) presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in the same year. Constructed completely of “found text” from lifesaving manuals, the music-theater piece, an adaptation of Antigone, was developed in workshops at Beth Morrison’s Prototype Festival of New Opera/New Music Theater and UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, headed by Kristy Edmunds.

Her opera highlights include Florida, with Randall Eng (UrbanArias); Oceanic Verses with Paola Prestini (Barbican Center, London); and libretto for the San Francisco Opera commissioned, Heart of a Soldier, based on the book by James Stewart with music by Grammy-winning Christopher Theofanidis. As a screenwriter, she penned the award-winning short film, Stag directed by Kevin Newbury, starring Sarah Steele, with music by Ennio Morricone. Her first screenplay, Stag was screened at over a dozen film festivals around the world and named “Best of New York”.

Di Novelli is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Honor Roll which highlights the sexism and ageism experienced by artists over the age of forty. She has won fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, UCross, and The Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy.

Besides teaching at the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at Tisch since earning an MFA in 1997, she has also served as a guest instructor at the National Theater Institute and Brown University where she earned an MFA studying playwriting with Paula Vogel.

Her episodic pilot, Nubile, advanced to the final round of the 2021 Sundance Episodic Lab and her musical, Choreomania was a semi-finalist at the National Musical Theater Conference, 2022. She is at work on a short film, When Last Seen, an adaptation of the Persephone myth for which is writer, director and executive producer. www.donnadinovelli.com