Theatre artist William di Canzio recently completed his residency at the MacDowell Colony as recipient of the Thornton Wilder Fellowship. While in residence, Mr. di Canzio began the first draft of his most recent play The Iranians, in the MacDowell Colony's Chapman Studio. The Iranians had its first public reading in August 2010.
William di Canzio has written fourteen plays, staged at such venues as the O'Neill Theater Center, Yale University, and the Falcon Theatre, Los Angeles. Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier was showcased in 2009; Dooley, first staged at Yale, will be premiered at the Diversionary Theatre in San Diego in May 2011.
Honors include a 2009 Julie Harris Playwright Award (Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier); a 2009 Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation Award and a residency at the Camargo Foundation (Dooley); and two fellowships in theater from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (Last Night Home and Hindustan). He has been three times a resident at the National Playwrights Conference (Hindustan; Open Heart; C-Section). His dramatic work has been commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville; his nonfiction, published in Commonweal.
He has taught playwriting and literature at Smith College, Haverford College, and Yale University. At Yale he was also appointed dean of Trumbull College, academic director in residence to four hundred undergraduates, a position he held for nine years. Born in Philadelphia, he is an alumnus of Saint Joseph's Preparatory School and the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University and MFA from the Yale School of Drama, where he was awarded the Eugene O'Neill scholarship in playwriting.
He and his partner James H. Anderson, associate executive director of a social service agency in Philadelphia, live in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania.
