the GILMAN & GONZALEZ-FALLA
THEATER FOUNDATION

Kirsten Childs

Celso Gonzalez-Falla and Sondra Gilman with 2000 winner, Kirsten Childs. Photo by Aubrey Reuben

2000 Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Musical Theatre Award recipient. Ms. Childs has written songs for jazz singer Dianne Reeves, co-starred with Chita Rivera in the musical Chicago, co-starred with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in the film See No Evil, Hear No Evil and performed on Broadway in Dancin', Jerry's Girls, and Sweet Charity. She is an alumna of NYU's Musical Theater Writing Program. For her show, The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, she is the winner of the Edward Kleban Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund Grant and a Richard Rodgers Development Award for the year of 1999, as well as the recipient of an Audelco Award, a Richard Rodgers Production Award, a Lucille Lortel award nomination, three Drama Desk nominations, and an Obie award for the year of 2000.   The Bubbly Black Girl…was recently produced at Playwrights Horizons, in association with Wind Dancer Theatre. Kirsten is co-writer of Sundiata, Lion King of Mali and of Reading Rainbow (both produced by Theaterworks/USA). Her adaptation of the 19^th century poem, The Highwayman, was recently commissioned by the McCarter Theater at Princeton University.

Kirsten’s current projects include a collaboration with playwright Joe Calarco and Ben Vereen (based on his life), an evening at Lincoln Center in the American Songbook series, a commission from the Vineyard Theater, an original musical project with novelist Walter Mosley, a collaboration with playwright Nilo Cruz and director Graciela Daniele on a children’s musical adapted from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story, and an original musical theater work with her brother, composer Billy Childs.