Self-portrait with camel
– Samode, India, January 2014
Krista Knight
Visiting Assistant Professor
Bio: I grew up in a small town in Northern California under the auspices of a special ed teacher and an entrepreneur. I rode horses, stalked banana slugs, and generally had an uproarious time (thanks to the luck associated with kissing the aforementioned yellowgastropod) before heading to Brown. I started school studying neuroscience and working in the Brown Pathology and Biomedical Research Lab.
What I love about science is the search for more precise ways of describing the known world. What drew me to playwriting was the opportunity to use those same parameters to create unique worlds. Because theater evolves over time, inevitably changing with each performance, dramatic language is powerful, current and saturated with risk.
The principals of Newtonian mathematics keep us reacting with equal force, and play worlds can stand as contained systems capable of creating their own language, their own rules, their own unique parameters. Every time I create a play, I create a world. But unlike Newton’s rule of vectors—consistent in a vacuum—the most exciting instant for me in the theater is that occasional moment of rupture, when the structure (with its rules, its language, its parameters) collapses in upon itself.
After Brown, I moved to NYC where I shacked up with a paramedic in an east village tenement with no shower and the bathtub in the kitchen. I fondly remember returning home nights to find un-insured friends being stitched up in said bathtub. It’s been years since I’ve inquired, “why is our bathroom covered in blood?” While in New York, I got a masters from NYU in Performance Studies and spent a year as the Page 73 Playwriting Fellow.
A still from Clementine and the Cyber Ducks, a play written by Professor Knight. You can learn more about this production by clicking the photo above.
I then moved to Southern California to take up surfing, teach writing, and get an MFA in Playwriting at UC San Diego with Naomi Iizuka. Highlights include narrowly escaping getting voted off graduate student council for losing a bunch of money on a drag ballet, annual grunion runs, and writing my first musical with an Arkansas bitpop band David’s Pegasus’ front-man Barry Brinegar. (www.KnightandBrinegar.com)
I’ve approximated an existence by writing a ride for a Tokyo theme park, selling a screenplay (geo-political sci-fi), and catalyzing enthusiasm for scripts of all kinds in American's collegiate youth. I'm bi-coastal. And generally multipolitan. (www.KristaKnight.com)
Courses Taught: Beginning and Intermediate Playwriting, Beginning Screenwriting, and Digital Storytelling.
Favorite Things:
Theatre Artists: Sarah Ruhl, Dan LeFranc, Pig Iron, Lauren Yee, Anne Washburn, Annie Baker, Bertolt Brecht, Dave Malloy, Rude Mechanicals, Brandon Jacob-Jenkins, Young Jean Lee.
Movies: Let the Right One In, Edward Scissor Hands, Brick, Fear(s) of the Dark, Pan's Labyrinth, Brave Little Toaster, Little Shop of Horrors, Gandahar, Interstella 5555, Spring Breakers.
Music: What Cheer? Brigade, Daft Punk, Max Raabe, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.
TV: Frisky Dingo, Frontline.
Books: The Secret History, Lolita, Wisconsin Death Trip, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, How to Do Things with Words, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Geek Love, Needful things, Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
See Professor Knight for advice on:
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Scrabbling together an existence as a writer.
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How to approach strangers for collaboration.
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Creating web experiences.
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Hair height.