Bio

Erin Kamler is a Los Angeles-based composer, writer, musician and scholar who tells stories that explore the intersection between feminist politics and culture. Erin's DIVORCE! THE MUSICAL, for which she wrote the book, music and lyrics, made its 2009 world premiere at the Hudson Theater in Los Angeles where it garnered the LA Times’ Critic’s Choice, Backstage West’s Critic’s Pick, won the 2009 Los Angeles Ovation Award for Best Book, Music and Lyrics for an Original Musical, won the 2010 Backstage Garland Award for Best Playwriting, won the 2010 Backstage Garland Award for Best Musical Score, won the LA Weekly Awards for Best Director and Musical Director, and was nominated for the 2009 LA Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Original Score. A three-time winner of Stephen Sondheim's Young Playwright's Festival and a participant in the Nautilus Composer-Librettist Studio and Ground Floor Lab at Berkeley Repertory Theater, Erin's plays have been staged at The Public Theater and Playwright's Horizons, and she won the 1994 University of Michigan Hopwood Award for playwriting.  Her musical RUNWAY SIXTY-NINE, about a strip club on the eve of the clean-up that transformed Times Square is in development at New Dramatists where it won the 2008 Frederick Loewe Award. Erin is currently developing a new musical, LAND OF SMILES, about the trafficking of women in Thailand.

As a recording artist, Erin has performed to audiences in India, Japan, Mexico, Italy, Turkey, Thailand and throughout the United States with her albums MANTRA GIRL: TRUTH, MANTRA GIRL: TRINITY and Kundalini Yoga Instructional DVD’s, and her music can be heard on numerous albums and films. As a vocal instructor, Erin has taught in public and private schools throughout Los Angeles.

A doctoral student at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, Erin's research focuses on using the arts as a tool for political communication. Her dissertation project engages a study of the trafficking of women in Thailand and critiques the State Department-driven anti-trafficking movement through the lens of culture and feminist international relations. Conversationally fluent in the Thai language, Erin has conducted qualitative fieldwork with anti-trafficking NGOs, government actors, female migrants and trafficking survivors. Erin holds a BA in music composition from Sarah Lawrence College, and a master's in public diplomacy from USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She is a recipient of the USC Graduate School's prestigious Research Enhancement Fellowship for her dissertation project, "Art, Social Justice and Women's Empowerment: Dramatization as Research in the Trafficking in Persons Space in Thailand." In 2013-14 she will serve as a New Directions Scholar at the USC Center for Feminist Research.