Caridad Svich

Title: Playwright; Artistic Director of New Play Development at Lucille Lortel Theatre (NYC)

Education:
Bachelor in Creative Arts-Performance, UNC Charlotte (1985)
Master of Fine Arts in Theatre-Playwriting, University of California, San Diego (1988)

Hometown: Philadelphia, PA

Caridad Svich is a multiple award-winning playwright, translator, editor, and screenwriter whose work has been produced across the U.S. and internationally. In 2024 she was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and in 2025 was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, along with theatre luminaries such as August Wilson (posthumously) and André De Shields.

A prolific writer, Caridad has written more than 100 plays, a variety of short works, and 15 translations. Her list of awards and honors is long. She received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize. She has won the National Latino Playwriting Award twice and has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times. In 2018, Caridad received the Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and in 2023 the Flora Roberts Award from The Dramatists Guild.

Currently, Caridad serves as Artistic Director of New Play Development at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York City and is collaborating with composer Stephen Schwartz, lyricist Gordon Greenberg, and actor Antonio Banderas on a musical about Pablo Picasso. Recent books include “Toward a Future Theatre” (2022) and the anthology “Transmedia Theatre Plays” (2025), which she edited. Her film “Fugitive Dreams,” co-written with and directed by Jason Neulander and based on her play of the same name, garnered acclaim at festivals in 2020 and 2021 and was publicly released in 2024. She is also an editor at Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge, UK) and Drama Editor at Asymptote literary translation journal.

“One of the things I learned at UNC Charlotte was to follow my own creative path and curiosities as an artist,” she says, “to trust my instincts, and to strive for excellence always.” While she was a student at UNC Charlotte Caridad received a national playwriting prize for her play “Waterfall,” which received a student-mounted production. But she also took turns on the stage herself, performing in productions of “Once Upon a Mattress” and “The Greeks.”

To prospective UNC Charlotte students Caridad says, “Focus on your work, and remain open to the invitations to make art and collaborate with other artists.”

Caridad currently lives in New York City. She was the recipient of the Department of Theatre 2016 Distinguished Alumni Award.  Read “Shape of Being,” the address she delivered at the awards ceremony, here.