James Serpento

James Serpento is a largely Midwestern performing artist filmmaker and educator having been raised in Iowa and educated at Iowa State University Ames and Indiana University Bloomington He credits such Midwestern institutions as Chicago Dramatists the Bloomington Playwrights Project and the Iowa Scriptwriters Alliance with his development as a writer for stage and screen His favorite city is Chicago where he spent a number of years as an actor director writer and teacher before moving on to Los Angeles where he has worked primarily as a director onstage and to which he occasionally returns His current projects are a musical version of Euripides The Bacchae for which he coauthored book and lyrics with Jeff CharisCarlson with music by Sarah Evans and two new plays Every Cottage Home coauthored with Louise Bylicki and Doll about Franz Kafka A collection of new short plays Love For Short coauthored with R Andrew White adapted from works of Anton Chekhov was published in 2021 He has one child a son named Samuel