Coni Ciongoli-Koepfinger, M.A.
Coni Ciongoli-Koepfinger, M.A. is a New York Indie Artist and the Host at AirPlay and Determined Women. She is a Playwright in Residence at Cosmic Orchid Theatre and Manhattan Repertory Theatre and Playwright in Residence and Associate Director at The Spiral Theatre Studio in Chelsea. Coni is the Winner of the 2021 Olwen Wymark Theatre Award by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
Artist, educator, and hybrid playwright Coni believes creative energy is never lost— it just changes hands and hearts. Coni is an avid supporter of the singularity of technological transformation, realizing that art has always had a vital role in the development of society; it now can exponentially increase its effect via tech advances.
Coni is a contributing writer for the Center of Conscious Creativity in LA, a Member of The Dramatists Guild, a former Board Member and Trustee of the International Centre for Women Playwrights, and a National Member of the League of Professional Theatre Women. She is also a member of Theatre Without Borders, the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF), and The International Theatre Network.
Coni is the Host of AirPlay, a weekly virtual theatre program now in its 12th season that brings the voices of artists, actors, and playwrights from all over the world together. Also, via new media, Coni has created Determined Women, a monthly feature that interviews women who share stories to encourage and inspire.
In addition to teaching theatre and composition at prominent universities like Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, and Point Park University, she is internationally published and produced playwright, theatre theorist, and librettist.
Her work also includes Simon Says in Playbill’s Virtual Theatre Festival 2020, Josie in the Bardo at The Chain Theatre, and The Unusual Chauncey Faust, premiering at the Rogue Festival in the summer of 2022.
Musical Theatre collaborations in development with composer Joe Izen include Eve of Beltane, a fresh look at political corruption in the face of ancient Celtic mythology that was given a 29 hour AEA staged reading at Broadway Bound Festival (2019), Schoolhouse, an ultramodern musical that takes the young victim of a school shooting through a magical journey into an imaginary schoolhouse to find compassion and joy, the new age musical, premiered in Athens under the direction of Sia Koskina, Kingdom Come, where technology meets its match in matchmaking with TED, the world’s first transhuman who falls in love with his boss only to reveal a bigger, brighter picture for all humanity, and Live from the Bardo with Dan Carter at Theater for the New City in Fall 2022. Watch AirPlay2020: Kingdom Come.
She has written well over 40 plays, short stories, books, and commissions such as Takin’ It Back, a ten-minute play for The Me Too Project in Harlem, and Playing House, a commissioned one-act about Bella Abzug for the Untold Stories Of Jewish Women and Playing Fate which was accepted for New Blood Series at Theatre for the New City.
In 2020, Coni worked virtually all over, with a new full-length, My Dinner with Mary, which was read online for The Producer’s Circle at the Players NYC in March and was produced in the Dream Up Festival in 2021 at the Theatre for the New City.
Coni has extensive experience teaching English, Composition, and Theatre at various colleges and universities.
Previously, between 2002 and 2017, Coni was an Adjunct Professor of English at Carlow University, at Carnegie Mellon University between 2010 and 2012, at Point Park University for more than 8 years, and almost for 10 years, an Adjunct Professor of English and Theatre at the Community College of Allegheny College. She developed a new teaching method called “Formative Stages” pedagogy for arts and writing composition.
Although Coni enjoys academia, the focus is on her dramatic work. She has been an Author at JAC Publishing & Promotions since 2000, and her play Candledancing was published with a brilliance score by British composer Robert Hugill.
Following that collaboration, Garrett, the Blue Giraffe got raves in Opera News for its performance at Hoxton Hall, London, won at the Bay Area Festival in Sonoma, and was read at the legendary Players Club in Gramercy Park and Pan Asian Repertory Theater. A review of her play Sideshow compared her thematic style to Rod Serling, and she has also been compared to Charles Dickens.
Read interJACtions: Monologues at the Heart of Human Nature, Volume II and Mother/Daughter Monologues Volume 2: Thirtysomethings.
Other productions of published work include Coffeehouse Magik at Brooklyn’s Museum of Sound Recording, children’s plays including Jack and the Talkback Beanstalk and Rudolph’s Big Secret, which was named the most produced by Dramasource. Her piece The Guardian won acceptance into the 2009 Mother Daughter Monologues by the International Center for Women Playwrights.
Coni earned her Bachelor’s Degree of Arts in Theater and Playwriting from Penn State University in 1980. She earned her Master’s Degree of Arts in English Literary and Cultural Theory from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002.
She is the Author of the Short Story Get the Message published in Visions of the Future (published by Lifeboat Foundation in 2015).
Watch her short movies, I Remember You (Anti War 48 Hour Film Project, 2022) and 101 Knocks.
Visit her LinkedIn profile, FilmFreeway page, Doollee profile, and New Play Exchange profile. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.