Sybille Pearson

Sybille Pearson was born on January 25, 1937, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1980, she was a graduate student in the creative writing program at the City College of New York. Her play, Sally and Marsha, a two-person comedy-drama was produced at the Playwrights Conference in Connecticut and was then produced off-Broadway in 1982 by the Manhattan Theatre club, starring Christine Baranski and Bernadette Peters.

Pearson earned a Tony nomination for her book for the musical Baby, which opened in 1984 on Broadway. She wrote several plays including Phantasie, Unfinished Stories, and True History and Real Adventures, many of which were produced off-Broadway. Pearson teamed up with Michael John LaChiusa in 2012 to adapt Giant, a novel by Edna Ferber into a musical, which was nominated for 9 Drama Desk awards. She worked with LaChiusa again for a commissioned piece from the Metropolitan Opera entitled And A Night and in 2016 on Rain, a musical adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s short story by the same name.

Sybille Pearson is a full-time professor at the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and has been a Creative Advisor to the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab.