BARBARA Hammond is a playwright and filmmaker.  She has many Irish affiliations thanks to her career in the arts, including participation in the annual Bloomsday on Broadway event and the 1st Irish Theatre Festival.

She is also a member of the Tyrone Guthrie Center, the Fallen Angel Theatre Company, the Irish Arts Center and the Irish Repertory Theatre. Hammond attended University College Dublin and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She graduated UMass/Boston with a degree in creative writing and English, and undertook graduate studies in theater and film at Hunter College in New York.
The Wisconsin native traces her Irish roots to Co. Laois, where her great great grandfather hailed from.

“I am someone who chose Ireland.  I decided as a young girl that if I was to be a serious writer I’d better go to the source, and when I was 17 bought a one-way ticket to London and then took one of the first ever Ryanair flights to Dublin,” Hammond recalls.

“I landed in Ireland during the years when many young Irish people were economic refugees trying to get out, and, after a few years of struggle, I was borne by that wave back across the Atlantic, briefly in Boston and then to New York.”

Hammond’s new play, Eva the Chaste, will open on July 6 on Theater Row in New York. It stars Aedin Moloney of the Fallen Angel Theatre Company. The play “speaks to the wider emigrant population from Ireland, though the title character only went as far as Paris. Her homecoming to Dublin is both wanted and painful, as are the mixed experiences of most people running towards one thing and away from another,” says Hammond.


 

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