Hammond's most recent play, Beyond the Pale, won the Special Jury Award and was nominated for Best Production, Best Director and Best Actress at the Tina Santi Flaherty Awards ceremony for the 1st Irish 2009 Theatre Festival. It was performed in a rectory in Manhattan that resembles the crumbling Northern Irish manor house where the play is set.
Her first film, June Weddings (writer-director) featuring Tom Noonan, Elzbieta Czyzewska and Ivan Martin, received the Directors' Special Recognition Award at the 2007 San Francisco International Short Film Festival, was nominated for Best Short Film at the Baltimore Women's Film Festival,and was an official selection at the Austin Film Festival, NY Filmmakers at Soho House, The Henry Miller Library's Short Film Screening Series in Big Sur, the Heart of Gold International Film Festival in Queensland, Australia, and was paired with Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets by Moviehouse Brooklyn for their First-time Filmmakers screening series.
Her play Norman and Beatrice, was produced by Synapse Productions in the Winter of 2006 to outstanding reviews. As a one-act, it was a finalist in the Tennessee Williams One-Act Play Contest and has had readings at Dublin’s Focus Theatre (with Tom Hickey), Dartmouth’s Hitchcock Center, The Sharon Playhouse and the Connolly Theatre (with Bill Irwin and Kathleen Chalfant).
She was the recipient of the 2005 Scribner Award for Excellence in Writing, is an annual contributor to The A Train Plays, a veteran of the 24-Hour Plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and a mentor playwright at the Yale Playwrights Festival.
In May 1998, she directed her own Paper Tigers at the ArcLight Theatre, which was produced again in 2006 by the Parish Players Theatre in Vermont. Barbara's first short plays, Breakfast in the Hamptons, Little Birds and War, were performed at Naked Angels and Ensemble Studio Theatre, and her first full-length play The Pilgrim Soul in You, was workshopped at the Westbeth Centre on Bank Street in 1997.
As an actor, she played Yelena with a Moscow Art Theatre-trained director and an all-Russian cast in Uncle Vanya, as well as roles with Red Earth Ensemble and other downtown theatre companies.
She is an originating member of a playwrights’ collective that continues to collaborate on pieces, most notably Reading to Renew. Originally performed with the Culture Project, it has gone on to celebrate New Orleans and raise funds for Gulf Coast libraries that were affected by Hurricane Katrina and the breach of the levees that followed.
She has been a frequent resident at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, is a 2010 Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellow, and an alternate for the 2010 Kerouac Project.