Playwright and Screenwriter

Joanne Koch

April 2, 1998 at 4:00 p.m.
Humanities 355
University at Albany, Uptown Campus

Using examples of outstanding screen adaptations, Dr. Koch offers guidelines for writing your own film adaptations of literary works. The seminar will focus on the challenges of filmic writing: character development, visual metaphor, writing dialogue, and screenplay format. Joanne Koch is a screenwriter, playwright, author and teacher of writing, who has won numerous awards for her work. She was the scriptwriter for High Top Tower, a six-part series broadcast on the Fox Network in 1991 and winner of the Midwest Emmy Award and the American Film and Video Award for Best Children's Television Series. She has written several teleplays for children that were aired on WBBM-TV in 1993-94 and numerous docudramas including Baby You're Okay on teen pregnancy, which won an Excalibur award, Changing Homes on foster children, and The Price of Daffodils on domestic violence.

Koch has had ten plays produced around the country including Nesting Dolls, which was broadcast in January on PBS after winning the Southern Illinois University Best Play Award; A Leading Woman, which will be part of a new anthology of women's plays to be published in 1998; Haymarket, which won the Chicago Cultural Center Patrons' Award; and Sophie, Totie, & Belle and Sophie Tucker: Red Hot Mama both of which she co-authored with University at Albany English Professor Sarah Blacher Cohen.

Dr. Koch teaches writing at National-Louis University and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She directs the Chicago Writers' Bloc, a playwrights group which presents new work in annual festivals. She is also President of the Chicago Alliance for Playwrights.