Donna Porterfield
Bio (download as MS Word file)

Donna Porterfield is Roadside Theater's Managing Director. She is also a writer, producer, teacher, and dramaturge. She recently CO-edited Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni-Appalachia Collaboration, a 112 page bilingual book, with accompanying compact disc, that probes and documents the sixteen-year collaboration between Roadside Theater and Native American artists of Zuni, New Mexico (published by Zuni A:shiwi Publishing, 2002, distributed by The University of New Mexico Press).

Working with Roadside since 1978, Ms. Porterfield has produced many of the company's cultural residencies including the 1990-1996 Zuni-Roadside artistic exchange that resulted in the co-creation and touring of the play, Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons, which she co-authored. Most recently, she conducted a residency with a women's shelter in southwest Virginia through which she wrote and produced Voices from the Battlefront, a play addressing domestic violence that continues to tour.

Ms. Porterfield's publications include "Mountaineers, Farmers, and Cowfolk Create Two Plays About Place," National Endowment for the Arts website (www.arts.endow.gov), 1999; "Appalachia's Roadside Theater: Celebration of a Community's Culture," The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena; Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland, editors, Critical Press of the Gunk Foundation, 1998; and "Arts Presenting and the Celebration of a Community's Culture" - High Performance Magazine, Vol. 16, #4, Winter 1993.

She is a member of the Appalshop Board of Directors and has served as consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Arts Council, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Arkansas Arts Council, Alternate ROOTS, Urban Bushwomen, the Southern Arts Federation, and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Consortium.

Ms. Porterfield graduated from West Virginia University and her graduate work was conducted at the University of Texas at El Paso.

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