After coming to Brown in April 2025 to see a production of her play “Potatoes of August,” Sibyl Kempson knew she would one day be back on College Hill.
“When I was walking around the campus, I had a weird premonition … I just said, ‘I think I’m going to end up teaching here someday.’”
In August, the Department of Theater and Performance Studies announced Kempson as the new head of the Master’s of Fine Arts in Playwriting program. Kempson succeeds Julia Jarcho, who held the role for over five years.
The Herald sat down with Kempson to learn about her journey to Brown and her experience during her first month leading the program.
Originally an actor, Kempson turned to playwriting after she wrote a play “as a joke.” Realizing that she had a knack for it, she decided to get her MFA in playwriting at CUNY Brooklyn College.
After graduating, she taught at several universities, including The New School, Sarah Lawrence College and Bryn Mawr College. Eventually, she also returned to her alma mater as an instructor.
“It felt like going home,” Kempson said. But “it was an adjunct teaching position,” and “I really needed more stability,” she said.
In April 2025, Kempson moved south to teach at the University of Texas at Dallas. But earlier this year, Jarcho announced that she was leaving Brown and she sent Kempson the job posting. Kempson said that she immediately knew she had to apply.
Now, as the head of the playwriting program, Kempson leads the graduate playwriting and thesis workshop and meets with each student every two weeks.
While the overall structure of the program has remained the same, Kempson has deviated from Jarcho’s approach to teaching, which was based around semesterly themes. Instead, Kempson’s pedagogical style is based on an instructional book by Betty Edwards called “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.”
“What I’m trying to do is get these writers to use language, which is a left-brain function … in a right-brain way, which is a creative and spatial, non-judgmental, irrational way,” she said.
Kempson is currently working on several new projects, including a gothic-style novel that she hopes to eventually develop into a script. Writing fiction is “a strange new world for me,” she said.
Kempson’s hiring comes in the wake of significant changes to related MFA programs at Brown. In 2025, the University announced that admissions for the Trinity/Brown Acting and Directing MFA programs would be indefinitely suspended. The last acting cohort graduated last spring.
“We consistently collaborated with the MFA actors last year” for the annual Writing is Live Festival and other theater projects, playwriting student Reed Flores GS wrote in an email to The Herald. These actors were “instrumental in the development of our work,” he added.
“We are now primarily working with undergraduate students and community members” who are “all terrific,” wrote James La Bella GS, a playwriting student.
“Even though we’ve lost that program, I feel that there will be some resilience there and we’ll be able to have a successful (Writing is Live) Festival,” Kempson said.
“I really believe we are in very good hands with Sibyl Kempson,” Flores wrote. “Aside from being a brilliant playwright and artist, she has extensive history as a teacher and mentor.”
Savannah Lyons Anthony GS described Kempson as “brilliant,” adding that Kempson’s style offers “another dimension to the education that I was receiving from Jarcho.”
Jarcho “built a monument of a program … and I’m in awe of how many resources she has come up with to support the development of these playwrights,” Kempson said. “I’m just trying to fill those big shoes as best I can.”
Noa Saviano is a senior staff writer covering Graduate Schools and Students. She is a sophomore from New York City and plans on concentrating in Comparative Literature and Cognitive Science.
