About Lisa-Maree
Lisa-Maree Southgate is a writer for stage and screen interested in the hopes and anxieties unspoken and unwritten in the thought-bubbles of her generation. Born in the 60s, growing up in the 70s and 80s, Lisa writes with a sense of history and hope and particularly likes to travel to the past and bring its treasures back to the present day. Her drama-in-progress, Cloudland, follows the hopeful young lives that danced across the floors of a glamorous ballroom in post-war Brisbane. Her play-in-progress, How To Kill Your Mother-in-law, is about a bond between two women across two culturally different generations, and an attempt to reconstruct a world they once shared. Her sitcom-in-progress, NeXt, follows a single mother and Generation Xer who finally gets her son off to university only to have her invalid mother land on her doorstep demanding care.
Lisa has a background in creative nonfiction, journalism, and independent theatre-making. She wrote and directed the book of the musical memoir Beware of Boys about the boys who suffered from institutional abuse in the 1980s, and about the bewilderment of the girls who loved them. Her play, Guilt, about the dead Irish writer James Joyce as a special needs parent, was short-listed for the Rodney Seaborn Award in 2018. Lisa-Maree is currently studying for her MFA in writing for performance at the National Institute of Dramatic Art.
