BIO

Tara is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s MFA program in Dramatic Writing.  Her work has been presented by The Director's Company, Theatre One, Fusion Theatre, One Armed Man, Oracle Theatre, Inc, the Bobik Theatre Ensemble, Woman Seeking…, the Acme Theatre Company, and various universities including Gardner-Webb and Colgate.  Her plays have also showcased at the Artists of Tomorrow Festival in NYC, the Pittsburgh New Works Series and the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Alaska. Serial monologues she wrote were performed for two years by the internationally recognized receptionist-robot, Valerie, and she toured in a Children’s Theatre Troupe, which she wrote for, co-directed, and performed in.  She has taught Playwriting and Screenwriting to students in High School, college and adult education programs at Carnegie Mellon and the Pittsburgh Public Theatre.  She has also led Creative Dramatics Workshops for children and teenagers in underserved areas throughout New York and New Jersey and has a background in social work.  She is a recipient of the Shubert Fellowship in Dramatic Writing, the New Works for Young Women [Actors] Award and is a member of the Dramatist’s Guild.  Tara has written a children's book, a novel, and writes and records music in the chick-core rap band, Girl Crusade.

Tara has been writing stories since she was four years old, but her passion first took dramatic form when she directed her third-grade classmates in a play she had written about a boy and his horse. When she was ten, she wrote and directed Bomeo and Cooliet, a satiric play based off of the encyclopedia’s summary of Shakespeare’s hit. At 14, she thought she had invented a new style of theater when she wrote an absurd full-length play, involving 10 characters all living at the same house, not knowing this was the case. Not long after, she discovered Ionesco and Albee, her two earliest influences (next to Northern Exposure), and was able to characterize her writing as “theater of the absurd.”

Now her work consists of talking bingo chips, mothers who pretend they are their own daughters, a stuffed dog causing scandal, vegetables contemplating their place in this world, a woman obsessed with decorating her house in human hair, and other oddities. Tara relishes the humor found in dark situations and the gravity found in the frivolous. Yet despite the absurd elements of her writing, it is important to her to find a very human factor which connects her work to her audience, while remaining truly theatrical.