Local playwright awarded fellowship

Branchville — Dominique Cieri of Branchville recently won a 2009 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Playwrighting Fellowship. A teaching artist and recipient of a previous fellowships in 2003, Cieri is a graduate of Rose Buford College in Kent, England, and Empire State College where she received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence. Cieri’s plays include Davie Award winner “Pitz & Joe” at Geva Theatre, N.Y., nominated for the American Drama Critics Association Award, and optioned for film. Other plays include: “For Dear Life,” “Last Kiss,” and her most recent, “Count Down,” produced in 2005 with Off World Theatre and The Artists Collective for Social Change at the Puffin Cultural Forum. Her essays on arts and education have been published in The New York Times and Teaching Artist Journal, co-authored with choreographer Catlin Cobb. She co-authored with Gabriella Weiss, “From the Attic, To the Classroom, To the Stage: The Holocaust,” for Yavneh Academy in Paramus, where she teaches the adaptation of non-fiction, based on the Holocaust. In January, she and producing artistic director Bari Hochwald of Florence International Theatre Company, supported by a grant from the Rothschild Foundation, launched a Living History Project to bring Holocaust stories of Florence, Italy, to the stage.