Playwrights
Ensemble member Gloria Bond Clunie’s VictoryGardens 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.
VictoryGardens 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 GwendolynBrooksCenter, 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 NorthwesternUniversity 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 NorthwesternUniversity,
who also portrays Carol in Living Green.