LAURA MARIA CENSABELLA’S plays have been produced or workshopped by The Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, The Women's Project & Productions, The Working Theatre, Interact Theatre in L.A., the American Living Room Series at The Ohio, the AthenaWorks Marathon, the Belmont Italian American Playhouse (which commissioned her play Some Girls), the Pacific Resident Theatre, The Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, and Ensemble Studio Theatre, where she is a member and runs the professional Playwrights Unit. She has been awarded three grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts: two in playwriting for Abandoned in Queens and Carla Cooks The War (formerly titled Three Italian Women), and The Geri Ashur Award in Screenwriting for her original screenplay Truly Mary. Truly Mary was developed at The New Harmony Project with Angelo Pizzo and Michael London. She has also been a two-time participant in the O'Neill Playwrights Conference for Abandoned in Queens and Jazz Wives Jazz Lives and has received writing fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The New Harmony Project and the O’Neill. Her short play Posing was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and The Actual Footage won the Tennessee Chapbook Prize for Drama. Both plays are published in Poems & Plays (Numbers Five and Seven). Ms. Censabella's teaching experience includes the New School for Drama (current), Sarah Lawrence College (current), the Actors Studio Drama School, Columbia University's School of the Arts, Columbia College's Undergraduate Writing Program, City University's MFA Writing Program, The Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. She has written the short film adaptation Physics for HBO's Women: Breaking the Rules series, and for two years she wrote for daytime television, winning two Emmy Awards. Her half-hour independent film Last Call (directed by Robert Bailey and starring Jude Ciccolella) has screened in festivals throughout the world, including the Avignon Film Festival, the Other Venice Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives’ New Works Series, and the Breckenridge Film Festival where it won the Best Short Drama Award. It is released by Cinequest on a compilation DVD entitled Second Sight: Cinequest Favorite Short Films, Volume II and is now available on Netflix (search: Second Sight, Vol. 2). She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America, East.