Swados ’73 Profiled in LA STAGE
Award-winning musician, director, and composer Elizabeth Swados '73 looked back on her Bennington days in a recent LA STAGE article announcing the revival of The Good Woman of Setzuan, a play for which she composed the original score.
"The whole time I was at Bennington," Swados said, "I was mentored by [former faculty member] Henry Brant. He was a genius of a composer and a great teacher. He was one of the first to have instruments move about the orchestral space and he would place instruments in different areas. I was in a piece he wrote where the orchestra was on stage at Carnegie Hall and a marching band was in the balcony. He thoroughly opened my imagination to investigate all possibilities."
Swados, who's earned five Tony Award nominations and three Obie Awards for her theatrical productions both on and off Broadway, is "equally adept in the literary world," LA STAGE notes, having published novels, non-fiction books, children's books and poetry to great acclaim.
The recent recipient of a special grant to record musical selections from her years of work, Swados has also been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ford Grant, Helen Hayes Award, Lila Acheson Wallace Grant, PEN Citation, and others.