About
I create from the body, the margins, and the fault lines—places where survival demands both tenderness and rebellion. My plays rise from the marrow of my own life: as a daughter, sister, musician, mother, and survivor marked by illness, healing, and the ongoing work of becoming. I write toward what resists easy resolution. I don’t seek to explain or moralize; I interrogate.
I’m drawn to women and nonbinary characters who refuse to be defined by what the world has told them they are. They live in the tension between duty and desire, faith and freedom, expectation and selfhood. Whether navigating history, family, injustice, or love, they fight—quietly or explosively—for space, truth, and transformation. My characters contradict themselves, clash, and evolve. They don’t just think—they ache, bleed, dance, cry, endure.
My protagonists wrestle with the pressure to be the “good girl” or the “Siren,” sounding the alarm against systems that silence, erase, or commodify them. Whether it’s the culture of complicity in Hollywood (Complicity), the intergenerational weight of perfection and trauma (Broken Thread), or the fight for reproductive freedom across centuries (A Meditation on Hope), each story centers women who defy binary roles and push back against the institutions that shape their lives.
I write with an ear for music, a sensitivity to silence, and a hunger to stretch beyond my own habits—to create work that lives at the intersection of grief, resistance, and radical joy. Whether the stage becomes a dreamscape, a courtroom, a hospital, or a haunted hotel, I use theatricality to reveal what lives beneath the surface of language.
I believe in radical empathy, not comfort. I’m not afraid of the dark. I move straight into it, trusting that’s where truth resides—where women search for their deepest, most authentic selves. I want my work to crack something open—to show audiences they are not alone, even in their hardest places.
My work holds space for those who’ve been silenced or erased. I write to remember them. I write to imagine otherwise.
Blog: The Experimental Writings of Diane Davis
NPX: D-Davis New Play Exchange
Bio
D-Davis is a playwright living in NYC and the Artistic Director at Eden Theater Company. Her most recent productions are Broken Thread (Femme Collective/Columbia Univ) and Complicity (New Ohio), and her one-act plays Night Becomes Morning (Chain Theatre), What’s What (Polaris Theater), and Memorial Tree, (Columbia Univ). She was a semifinalist for Premiere Stages, The Road Theater and Bronx Creative Vision Award (Broken Thread) and awarded a Workshop Theatre Residency (Broken Thread), American Woman Fellowship (Grrls Play Bass) and HB Studio Residency Fellowship (Complicity). Her work has been developed and/or produced at New Ohio, Primary Stages, Eden Theater Play Lab, Howl Playwrights, AMIOS, Goddard College, and Columbia University. She studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and earned a BA in theater from Bennington College. She is a published academic with an MA in history from CUNY and MFA in playwriting from Columbia University, and granted two NEH research fellowships (Feminism and Philosophy). She is a member of the Dramatist Guild, the Actors Studio Playwright and Director’s Unit, HOWL Playwrights, Theatre East; and is the Literary Associate for The Tent Theater Company.
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.”
— Martha Graham