D-Davis
(Updated 12/11/25) D-Davis (Diane Davis) is a neurodivergent playwright living in NYC. She is a member of the Play Penn 2025-2026 Cohort, and was a finalist for Cry Havoc. Her play 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 Columbia University), Complicity (New Ohio), and her one-act plays Erasing Time, short-listed SPF-16, and Night Becomes Morning (Chain Theatre), Memorial Tree, (Columbia University, pub. Pitkin Review), and What’s What (Polaris Theater). Her work has been developed or produced by The New Ohio, Primary Stages, New York Theater Workshop, Eden Theater Company, Theatre East, Workshop Theatre, Actors Studio (NYC), Howl Playwrights, AMIOS, Dramatist Guild, 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.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA:
Website: https://d-davis.com
Blog: https://d-davis.org
IG: @dianedavis_writer
FB: www.facebook.com/dianedavis.writer
MORE ABOUT ME:
I create from the body, the margins, and the 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, who’s neurodivergence moves through illness, healing, and ongoing change. I’m not interested in explaining everything or telling people how to feel. Instead, I press on the bruise. I ask hard questions, turn them over, and invite the audience to sit in the tension with me. I’m drawn to women and nonbinary characters who refuse to be defined by what the world has told them they are. They’re constantly pulled between what they “owe” others and what they owe themselves: between faith and doubt, obligation and hunger, what’s expected and who they are. Whether they’re dealing with family, history, injustice, or messy, complicated love, they’re always fighting—sometimes quietly, sometimes like a storm—for room to breathe and to be seen. They argue, make mistakes, double back, and grow. They don’t exist just in their heads; they feel everything in their bones. They break down, crack open, move, weep, and keep going. Writing with an ear for music and a sensitivity to silence, I craft stories shaped by grief, sharpened by resistance, and shot through with flashes of joy. I’m not interested in shortcuts or neat, inspirational endings. I prefer the slow build of a voice that can’t be easily dismissed. I use theatricality to expose what people can’t quite say out loud. I want my plays to pry something open in people: to remind them they’re not alone in their hardest moments. I always leave space for the audience to argue with the story, to rage, to hope, and to imagine a world a little softer and more ferocious than the one they walked in from.
WHAT I'M WORKING ON:
Fault Line follows Bette Singer, Director of a fetal medicine unit in Arizona, on the day the 1864 law criminalizing care for terminal pregnancies is reinstated. reeling from exhaustion, Bette slips into a dream of a Puritan quilting circle—midwives, poets, martyrs—whose resistance stitches her into a long line of women caught between faith, medicine and survival. Waking life brings its own pressure: her seventeen-year-old niece Justine arrives pregnant and fleeing her rigidly religious mother, Beverly, while a new doctor, Caroline Bedford, carries the language of ideology into Bette’s exam rooms, reflecting the protest lines outside. As home and hospital become the same fault line between law and life, Bette must decide whether to uphold the systems closing in on her or stand beside Justine’s right to choose, and what hope looks like on broken ground.
KEYWORDS:
Neurodivergent, Mediterranean, Woman, Writer, Dramaturg, Historian, iterary Associate, Producer, Artistic Director, Advocate, Artist
