About
As a queer neurodivergent playwright, I create from the body, the margins, and fault lines: places where survival demands both tenderness and rebellion. My plays grow out of the marrow of my lived life, as a daughter, sister, musician, mother, and survivor, navigating illness, healing, and ongoing change. I’m not interested in explaining everything or telling people how to feel. Instead, I press hard on the bruise inside my characters, turn them over, and invite the audience to sit in the tension with me.
I’m drawn to women characters who refuse the names the world gives them. They live between what they owe others, and what they owe themselves: between faith and doubt, obligation and desire, what’s expected and who they are. Whether confronting family, history, injustice, or complicated love, they fight — sometimes quietly, sometimes like a storm — for room to breathe and be seen. They argue, make mistakes, search for footing, and grow. They feel everything in their bones. They break down, crack open, weep, and keep going.
My protagonists contend with the pressure to be the “good girl” or the “Siren,” while calling out systems that silence, erase, or commodify them. “Complicity” exposes Hollywood’s culture of looking the other way. “Broken Thread” unravels perfectionism, inherited shame, and family myths about who you’re allowed to be. “Fault Line: A Meditation on Hope” examines the unfinished fight for body autonomy across generations.
With an ear for music and a sensitivity to silence, I craft stories shaped by grief, sharpened by resistance, and lit by flashes of joy. I am interested in the slow build of a voice that can’t be easily dismissed. I believe theatricality becomes a way to surface what can’t yet be said. I want my plays to loosen what has hardened in myself and others, and to to remind people they’re not alone in their hardest moments.
I envision a theatre rooted in vulnerability, rigor, and collaboration: rooms that honor process as much as product, where art becomes a tool for reckoning, restoration, and reimagining. I want to work with artists unafraid of risk, who value honesty over polish, and see theatre as a live argument with the world outside. For me, theatre is where we face what’s hard, repair what we can, and dream out loud about what might be imaginable.
BIO
I hold space for those silenced or erased.
I write to remember them.
I write to imagine otherwise.
D-Davis is a neurodivergent playwright who creates from the body, the margins, and the fault lines: places where survival demands both tenderness and rebellion. Her plays grow out of the marrow of her lived life, as a daughter, sister, musician, mother, and survivor, who’s neurodivergence moves through illness, healing, and ongoing change. She was a finalist for Cry Havoc. Her play, A Meditation on Hope was a semifinalist for the O’Neil Conference and the Terrance McNally Incubator, and her Broken Thread was a semifinalist for Premiere Stages, Road Theatre, Bronx Creative Vision Award and a Workshop Theatre Intensive. She received an DQT American Woman Fellowship (Grrls Play Bass) and HB Studio Residency Fellowship (Complicity). Her most recent productions are Broken Thread (Femme Collective), and Complicity (New Ohio), and one-act plays Erasing Time, short-listed SPF-16, Night Becomes Morning (Chain Theatre), Memorial Tree, (Columbia University, pub. Pitkin Review), and What’s What (Polaris Theater). Other work has been developed or produced by Primary Stages, the Actors Studio, New York Theater Workshop, Eden Theater Company, AMIOS – Project 42, Theatre East, Workshop Theatre, Howl Playwrights, Goddard College and Columbia University. She earned a BA in Theater at Bennington College, an MA in History at CUNY, granted two NEH research fellowships (Feminism and Philosophy), and earned an MFA in playwriting at Columbia University. She currently works as the Literary Associate for The Tent Theater Company. www.d-davis.com
“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