Mady Schutzman is a writer, scholar, and theatre artist. She has published essays and performance texts in several journals including Black Clock, The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Theatre Topics, The Journal of Medical Humanities, American Communication Journal and Cargo, as well as in several critical anthologies. Her book The Real Thing: Performance, Hysteria, and Advertising (Wesleyan, 1999) is a feminist critique of the iconography of the female body in popular advertising. Schutzman is a practitioner and scholar of the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), and is co-editor of Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism (Routledge, 1994) and A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (Routledge, 2006). She works as a dramaturge and playwright in Los Angeles, serves as a faculty advisor of MFA writers in Community Arts Partnership (CAP), and teaches courses in performance theory and practice, ethnographic methods, creative non-fiction, and the literary genres of testimony and magical realism.

Schutzman is currently working as director and producer of a feature-length montage film, Dear Comrade, inspired by one of California's most successful secular cooperative colonies, Llano del Rio. The film employs documentary conventions to tell the story of Llano, but it resides not so much in the past as in the musings, questions, frustrations, and fantasies of others (real and fictional) who have assumed comparable struggles. What at first promises to be a traditional documentary film morphs into a montage of parallel universes, sci fi literature, historical re-enactments, clownery, and political commentary.  Dear Comrade, also borrows heavily from Mady’s performance background: documentary subjects not only perform as themselves, but explicitly play and re-imagine themselves through improvisation and scripted scenes.

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