Donna Di Novelli

Donna Di Novelli has a writing career that spans film, opera, music- theater and stage. A multi-genre artist, Di Novelli recently received a substantial grant from the NYC Women’s Fund for her short film, When Last Seen, an adaptation of the Persephone myth for which she is writer, director and executive producer. She attended the 2018 Sundance Film Festival as the co-writer of Josephine Decker’s narrative feature Madeline’s Madeline, 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 Neon 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 is an adaptation of Antigone and began with a residency at the National Musical Theater Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center. Her opera highlights include Florida, with Randall Eng (UrbanArias); Oceanic Verses with Paola Prestini (Barbican Center, London); and Heart of a Soldier with Grammy-winning composer, Christopher Theofanidis, commissioned by the San Francisco Opera. As a screenwriter, she penned the award-winning short film, Stag directed by Kevin Newbury, starring Sarah Steele and Rachel Jett, 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". She has won fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, UCross, and The Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy. In the summer of 2024 she was awarded a month-long residency in Venice, Italy through the Emily Harvey Foundation. 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 she is in post-production for its proof-of-concept. 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. www.donnadinovelli.com