Catherine Filloux is a French-Algerian-American playwright. She has received awards from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the O'Neill, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, and the Asian Cultural Council. In 2003 she was a Fullbright Senior Specialist in playwriting in Cambodia.
Filloux's plays have confronted the issue of genocide in many nations. She was first drawn to the subject on reading of the psychosomatic blindness suffered by a group of Cambodian women after witnessing the massacres of the Khmer Rouge, a story that formed the basis of her 1996 play Eyes of the Heart. She continued to work with survivors of the Cambodian genocide, developing the oral history project A Circle of Grace with the Cambodian Women's Group at St. Rita's Centre for Immigration and Refugee Services in the Bronx, New York.
Her 2005 play Lemkin's House is based on the life of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew and American immigrant lawyer who invented the word genocide in 1944 and spent his life striving to have it recognized as an international crime.
Filloux states "For a while, these crimes were the 'best-kept secrets,' but they're not even secrets. They happen all the time, and nobody cares. And that's the problem on some level with doing this kind of theater. There's just a little wall that's been built up against these things, and to write theater about them is part of the challenge." [1]
Of her parents, Filloux says, "My dad was born in the center of France, and he became an adventurer," who boated from France to New York in a catamaran. "My mom was a very literate person who loved literature" and wrote poetry in both French and English. As a child, Filloux moved with her family to San Diego, where she grew up. She says, "We grew up ... in this kind of schism of Algeria, France, and San Diego. So it made for a background of not really knowing where one belongs..." [2]
Filloux received her M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (NYU) and her French Baccalaureate with Honors in Toulon, France.