The Founder

Ayvaunn Penn BA, MA, MFA

Stethoscope Stage Founder & Producer

Ayvaunn Penn (Columbia University Playwriting Dean’s Fellow) is a playwright-director and lyricist-composer passionate about nurturing the next generation of theatre artists. She is an instructor within the Texas Christian University Theatre Department and is best known for her work in theatre-for-social-change. Her latest theatre-for-social-change piece entitled For Bo has garnered national honor as a  Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference 2020 and 2021 Finalist. After adapting this stage play into a community-illustrated screenplay, the film adaptation of For Bo was selected for three 2021 film festivals across the country. Those festivals include: Silicon Valley African Film Festival (Honorable Mention) in California, Gary International Black Film Festival in Indiana, and Lone Star Film Festival (Special Screening at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) in Texas. Hence, Stethoscope Stage is not Penn’s first theatrical enterprise designed to harness the power of theatre to address contemporary social issues.

Penn was inspired to launch Stethoscope Stage in the summer of 2021 when the national conversation around the danger of vaccine misinformation was at a notable high. With medical professionals and national leaders voicing concern for people seeking and acquiring vaccine information from unreliable resources, Penn decided it was time to use the power of theatre to facilitate open, honest, factual conversations about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccination. In this moment, Stethoscope Stage was born. It is Penn’s vision that over the coming years this national play festival will highlight other key subject matter within health care and continue to act as a bridge of understanding, empathy, and compassion between medical professionals and members of the general public.