Bio

Marissa Skudlarek ("skood-LAHR-ek") is a playwright, translator, software engineer, arts writer, and more. She is a member of the 2020-21 PlayGround Writers Pool.

Productions of her new translation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano at Cutting Ball Theater and her short play “The Great Man Theory” (written for the anthology evening These People’s History of the 20th Century) at EXIT Theatre have been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

She was the 2017 Resident Playwright at the Custom Made Theatre Co. in San Francisco, where her play You’ll Not Feel the Drowning received a workshop production in collaboration with EXIT Theatre.

She won the Young Playwrights Festival National Competition in 2006 with her play Deus Ex Machina, and her play The Rose of Youth won the Marilyn Swartz Seven Award in 2008. 

Marissa’s other works include full-lengths Pleiades (produced by No Nude Men in 2014) and Juana, or The Greater Glory (workshopped by the Loud & Unladylike Festival in 2016). Her shorter plays have been commissioned and staged by EXIT Theatre, the San Francisco Olympians Festival, PianoFight, and more. Her translation of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée received a staged reading at San Francisco Theater Pub in 2013.

Marissa grew up near Portland, Oregon, and graduated from Vassar College with a double major in Drama and French. She has been based in San Francisco since 2008.