UNIVERSITY NEWS - JULY 2003

MEDIA CONTACT: Stacia Smith
561/297-2971 or ssmith@fau.edu

FAU Student Wins Award in 2003 Playwrights Festival

BOCA RATON, FL (July 21, 2003) - Florida Atlantic University Ph.D. candidate Bonnie M. Benson won the award for Best New Play in the 2003 Playwrights Festival sponsored by Palm Beach Dramaworks Studio Theatre, which took place in June. She also received a $500 award.

Benson is a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Studies' Public Intellectuals Program of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at FAU. Her play, "The Crones Among Us," deals with issues of aging in contemporary U.S. society and is part of her creative dissertation, "The Other Side of Fifty."

Benson is a founding member of the FAU Crones Counsel, a student organization dedicated to fighting ageism, and former president of the FAU Public Intellectuals Student Association (PISA). She has produced and directed other plays at FAU while working on her Ph.D., including "The Vagina Monologues," "The Lysistrata Project" and Stanford Lyman's "The Palm of Death." She has also received several awards for her productions, including her play, "Myths and Other Lies," which was a finalist in the SlamPlay 2002 contest of the Theatre League of South Florida. She also received a Foster Fellowship Award for Emerging Artists from the Cultural Foundation of Broward, Inc. in June 2000.

Benson has had short stories, essays and poetry published in Troubador, Women's Studies Journal, The Miami Herald, The Christian Science Monitor and the Tico Times, published in Costa Rica.

The FAU Ph.D. in Comparative Studies is an interdisciplinary program for students interested in an advanced education and life as a public intellectual. The program explores historical, conceptual and practical relationships among such areas as public policy, mass media, literature, aesthetics, ethics, gender, culture and rhetoric.
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