Join us for an evening with Penda Diouf--one France's most significant emerging playwrights for the reading of a work in progress about the queer African-American composer Julius Eastman.

Penda Diouf (Senegal/France), is a French playwright, librettist, and actress of Senegalese-Ivorian heritage whose work explores identity, invisible histories, colonial legacies, and ecological themes. Based in Lille, she began writing plays at nineteen, and her very first work, Poussières, was selected by the Comédie-Française in 2010.

Her play La grande Ourse won the Text'avril Festival Jury Prize in 2018, the Collidram Prize in 2021, and was a finalist for the Prix Sony Labou Tansi in 2022. Her autobiographical play Pistes… won the La Chartreuse reading committee prize and the award for best German radio fiction in 2022, and was broadcast on France Culture. In 2023, she received the SACD Prize for Upcoming Talents, and in 2025 she staged Pistes… herself and created a musical performance with composer Cloé du Trèfle.

Her most recent play, Sœurs, nos forêts aussi ont des épines (2024), was staged in 2025 by director Silvia Costa. Also in 2025, her play May Landschaften received its world premiere at Theater Münster in a German translation. Her plays have been translated into German, English, Portuguese, Armenian, Czech, and Finnish, and she has held writing residencies at the Royal Court in London, the Institut Français in Tunis, the Villa Albertine in New York, and the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. Together with Anthony Thibault, she co-founded Jeunes Textes en Liberté, which supports emerging playwrights and promotes greater diversity in theatre.

Her first novel, about the queer African-American composer Julius Eastman, is forthcoming.

About Julius Eastman: 

Eastman (October 27, 1940 – May 28, 1990) was an American composer. He was among the first composers to combine the processes of some minimalist music with other methods of extending and modifying his music as in some experimental music. He thus created what he called "organic music". In compositions like Stay On It (1973), his melodic motifs were not unlike the catchy refrains of then pop music.

He studied performance and composition in New York and contributed to new music scenes in New York, Buffalo, and Chicago, touring and recording as a performer and enjoying many performances of his own music. As a conductor, musician, and vocalist, he had a close artistic relationship with Arthur Russell and worked briefly with Meredith Monk and Pierre Boulez. His voice is that of Peter Maxwell Davies' Mad King on Nonesuch Records. He worked in a variety of musical styles, including classical, jazz, and crossover.

During the 1970s (and perhaps shortly thereafter), he openly expressed himself in terms of his race, sexual orientation, or both in at least one performance and also in his compositions, including Gay Guerrilla. These gestures were not well received. He began to contend with a lack of professional opportunities, falling into relative obscurity while struggling with substance use and homelessness in the 1980s.

After his early, possibly HIV/AIDS-related death in 1990, Kyle Gann remembered him in a much belated 1991 obituary in the Village Voice.^[1] In the 21st century, his work rose to international prominence within contemporary classical music. There have been many recent professional editions, performances, and recordings of his music, as well as some extended scholarly treatments of his life and work.

About Penda Diouf:

„In speaking of these deep, lingering wounds that colonialism and racism have inflicted, and how she speaks of them, Diouf does the only thing that can perhaps help, at least a little, to heal trauma: She brings them out of the repressed, the concealed, the forgotten into our consciousness, and she does it in such a poetic and empathetic way that when we listen to her, even white people, descendants of the European colonial powers, are deeply touched and moved to reflect on the causes of these wounds and to relate to them.“ (Jury’s statement).

Picture of Penda Diouf by Epanya Mario