Lisa Loomer is a playwright and screenwriter who has also worked as an actress and stand-up comic. She is best known for her play The Waiting Room, in which three women from different time periods meet in a modern doctor's waiting room, each suffering from the effects of their various societies' cosmetic body modification practices (foot binding, corsetry, and breast implantation). She also co-wrote the screenplay for the film Girl Interrupted. Loomer is an alum of the New Dramatists and was a 1985 playwright-in-residence at the Intar Theatre in New York City. Many of her plays deal with the experiences of Latinos and Hispanic-Americans, and with various aspects of contemporary family life.
Loomer is married to composer Joe Romano; their son Marcello was born in 1998.
Loomer has won the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award (in 1994 for The Waiting Room), the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the The Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award, a Back Stage West Garland Award for Playwriting (in 2003 for Living Out), the Imagen Award for positive portrayals of Latinos in all media, and American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg New Play Award (in 1995 for The Waiting Room and in 1999 for Expecting Isabel.) She won the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play in 1999 for Expecting Isabel. ]She was also the recipient of 2 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and one from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.