Maestra • For the women who make the music in the musical theater industry.

Biography

Isabella Dawis is a playwright and performer. Trained as a classical musician, she collaborates with artists of all disciplines to create genre-crossing new works.

Isabella is bookwriter/lyricist for the musical HALF THE SKY, the story of an Asian American woman climbing Mount Everest -- for which she and composer Tidtaya Sinutoke won the 2020 Weston-Ghostlight New Musical Award. In January 2021 HALF THE SKY was presented as an episodic audio musical, as part of the 5th Avenue Theatre's 20/21 Digital Season. HALF THE SKY is an inaugural First Draft commission by the 5th, with further development at Theater Mu's New Eyes Festival, Theater Latté Da's NEXT Festival, the O'Neill Center, and the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat.

Isabella's chamber musical with Tidtaya Sinutoke, SUNWATCHER, the true story of Japanese female astronomer Hisako Koyama, is being developed in the 2020-21 Civilians' R&D Group, with an upcoming residency at Goodspeed Musicals' Johnny Mercer Writers Grove, also featured in the Weston Playhouse's Songs for Today series. Isabella recently collaborated with composer/lyricist Emily Gardner Xu Hall on the 24 Hour Plays: Viral Musicals.

As a playwright and librettist, Isabella's work has been supported by Musical Theatre Factory, the Kurt Weill Foundation, New York Theatre Barn, the Bushwick Starr, Broadway Buskers, Town Stages, Central Square Theater, the Skeleton Rep, New England Conservatory, and the Schubert Club. She was a 2019-2020 Rockwell Scholar at the Primary Stages Einhorn School of Performing Arts.