Gloria Bond Clunie

Gloria Bond Clunie

Playwrights Ensemble member Gloria Bond Clunie’s Victory Gardens premieres include North Star, directed by Sandy Shinner, winner of the Joseph Jefferson Award for New Play, the 1994 Theodore Ward African-American Playwriting Award, and the 1999 American Alliance for Theater and Education Distinguished Play Award.  North Star was subsequently published by Dramatic Publishing Company, and is included in Seven Black Plays, a new anthology edited by Chuck Smith with a forward by August Wilson. 

Victory Gardens also premiered Shoes, directed by Andrea J. Dymond (2005 Black Theatre Alliance New Play Award).  A reading of Shoes was also performed at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta as part of the American Alliance for Theater & Education Conference.

Gloria’s newest play Living Green has received several workshops at Victory Gardens, was honored with an award and reading in May at the 2008 New Professional Theatre Writers Festival in New York, and was a finalist in Chicago Dramatist’s Many Voices National Playwriting Project.    

Other produced credits include Drip – Part One of the Dear Cora Trilogy – which opened the 2008-09 Season at Chicago’s eta Creative Arts Foundation; Sweet Water Taste, which was awarded a Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwriting in 2005, included in the New Stages Series at the Goodman Theatre, and given an Honorable Mention by the Stage 3 Theatre Fest in Sonora, California; Secrets; the musical Sing! Malindy, Sing!; Dreams; as well as two children’s plays Basket of Wishes, Bucket of Dreams and the adaptation of Patricia McKissack’s award winning book Mirandy and Brother Wind commissioned by Northwestern University.  

Her new play Quark was one of two finalists in the 2007 STAGE International Script Competition for the best new play about science and technology, sponsored by the Professional Artists Lab and the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Additional writing awards include the 1997 Alice Walker Short Fiction Award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Center, a 1996 Illinois Playwriting Fellowship, a 1993 Arts Education Fellowship (NEA/CBE), the 2000 Scott McPherson Playwriting Award, and the 2006 Illinois Screenwriting Fellowship.   Her novel Dear Cora was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and a semifinalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition. 

In 1979 she founded and for eight years was the Artistic Director of the Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre in Evanston, Illinois.  While there, she directed over 25 productions including Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, Home, Raisin and Ain’t Misbehavin’.  She received a B.S. in theater and an M.F.A. in directing from Northwestern University and since 1981 has been a full-time drama specialist in Evanston's School District 65.

 In 1986, Clunie was given the Evanston Mayor's Award for the Arts and has been recognized for her contributions to both the arts and education by many organizations including the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Chicago’s Black Theater Alliance and the American Alliance for Theater & Education. 

She is a member of the Dramatists Guild.  Originally from Henderson, North Carolina, Gloria now lives in Evanston, Illinois.  She and her husband Basil are the proud parents of one daughter, Aurelia, a recent graduate of Northwestern University, who also portrays Carol in Living Green.