Check out Catherine's latest interview in Ms.
The Ms. Q&A: Award-Winning Playwright Catherine Filloux Takes on Femicide, Trauma, War, Immigration and More
“As an artist, I will rise up and make change”
For the past three decades, award-winning artist, playwright, and librettist Catherine Filloux has been traveling to conflict areas around the world creating art that addresses human rights and social justice.
Filloux has traveled to Iraq where her play about honor killing, The Beauty Inside, was produced in the Kurdish language, starring actors from around Iraq. In Cambodia, her play Photographs from S-21 and her opera Where Elephants Weep were performed by both Cambodian and U.S. actors. In the U.S., her plays and operas have addressed mass incarceration, voting rights, immigration, and political asylum. Recent writing projects include one with Lamp Lifeboat Ladder with refugee-survivors in Greece, formerly incarcerated writers with Rehabilitation Through the Arts, and supporting her Cambodian friend, now a political prisoner.
The New York Times calls Filloux’s work “compelling drama…a call to action…about the place where horror and grief meet.”
Immigrant Report writes her plays are “more than just stories, they’re catalysts; they aim to send you forth from the theater not just satisfied and thinking but to make change in the world.”
Exeunt says “the human rights playwright…Filloux’s play opens another window to a large-scale issue that deserves more attention.”
Broadway World called her “adeptly employing thematic devices to explore the human desire and need to help others, ultimately furthering humanity and leaving the audience with a craving to give back to any person or community in need.”
The child of a French father and an Algerian mother, raised in San Diego, Filloux grew up with an outsider’s perspective — it has informed all of her work. She has the spirit of a fighter.
“It is unacceptable that women still don’t have rights; it’s unacceptable that the poor stay poor.
Now is the time for art, for change, for beauty, and for human rights; I won’t take no for an answer.”
“Catherine FIlloux is a leading light in the richest sense. There's darkness out there in the world, and she carries discernment and courage forward in text and action, inspiring reflection that urges action, and hope that orients progressive change. There's darkness in here - in the heart's disordered appetites - and she has the moxy and the patience to discover light's prime in the midst of a soul's confusion. Genocide, injustice - unkindness - are subjects; love, graceful poetics, and a deeply collaborative practice are her healing address. This is a highfallutin' look at her mercies. But her humor, her romantic dancing, and her esthetic and corporeal hospitality are as ready and as bold. A leading light, and we follow, because it's time.” - ERIK EHN