GAEN MURPHREE    writer

Gaen Murphree is a writer of nonfiction, playwright, and theatre director. She lives in Middlebury, VT, with her travel writer husband, Gregor Clark, and cats Mr. Stripey and Scheherezade. They have two daughters. Together Gregor and Gaen work a large organic garden.

 

For the Addison Independent, Gaen covered agriculture, the environment, energy, Middlebury College, and the towns of Bristol, Lincoln, Monkton, New Haven, and Starksboro. Her series on migrant dairy workers in Addison County, Vermont’s largest dairy county, won the Vermont Press Association's Best State Story for a Nondaily. As a freelancer she's written for the Middlebury College Newsroom, the Vermont Land Trust, and Lonely Planet, among others. Her work has also appeared in Mother Jones magazine, the San Francosciso Chronicle, Seven Days, and the Green Mountain Echo. Over her career as a wordsmith, Gaen has worked as an editor for Microsoft, Food First Press, North Point Press, University of California Press, and was Editorial Director for Safer Society Press.

 

Gaen holds an MFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Washington School of Drama. She has worked at such theatres as the Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre, the Tacoma Opera,  the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, where she taught text analysis and directed in the MFA program. Favorite roles as an actor include six months touring California as a Wacky Mom on Stilts with Make A Circus and two summers doing Shakespeare-in-the-Parks with the Portland Actors Ensemble, as Celia in As You Like It and Adriana in The Comedy of Errors. In Vermont, she created and toured a one-man show on Charles Dickens, directed the first staged reading of Angela J. Davis's Griswold, acted as verse coach on the Middlebury Actors’ Workshop’s production of Macbeth, and directed scenes from The Magic Flute and Dido and Aeneas for the Youth Opera Company of Vermont. She taught theatre at Marlboro College. Her first play was produced by the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where she worked in the literary department.

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Gaen is currently at work on A Simple Man, a play about our ecological crisis, the destructive power of greed, and the returning POW who became Francis of Assisi.