Erin Courtney is an American playwright and visual artist from Hermosa Beach, California. [1]
Courtney is known for employing nontraditional structures in her plays, with reviewers and collaborators describing her work as "[a] delicate gem," [2] "a visual and aural kaleidoscope," [3] and "within a structure that is less linear than collage-like." [4]
Courtney graduated from Brown University in 1990 with a BA in Visual Art, the San Francisco Art Institute in 1993 with an MFA in Painting, and from Brooklyn College in 2003 with an MFA in Playwriting. [5] As an educator, Courtney taught at Brooklyn College's Playwriting MFA program and acted as its Playwriting Program Coordinator. In 2020, she became an assistant professor at Northwestern University, in its Writing for Screen and Stage program. [6]
Since 1997, Courtney has had work developed, read, and produced at Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and indie theater venues including HERE Theater, Vineyard Theater, The Flea, Atlantic Theater Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville and Playwrights Horizons. [7]
Courtney was a member of 13P, the downtown New York playwriting-producing collective that formed in 2003 and dissolved in 2012. [8] Her 13P production, A Map of Virtue, won a 2012 Special Citation Obie Award. [9]
Courtney was a Resident Playwright of New Dramatists from 2012 - 2019. [10]
In 2013, Courtney was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and Performance Art. [11]
Courtney sits on the executive board of Clubbed Thumb. In 2018, she helped develop Clubbed Thumb's Biennial Commission prompt, which urged writers to "alternative play shapes" in their storytelling. [12] [13]
David Henry Hwang is an American playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and theater professor at Columbia University in New York City. He has won three Obie Awards for his plays FOB, Golden Child, and Yellow Face. Three of his works—M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, and Soft Power—have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Tina Howe is an American playwright. In a career that spans more than four decades, Howe's best-known works include Museum, The Art of Dining, Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, and Pride's Crossing.
Gina Gionfriddo is an American playwright and television writer. Her plays Becky Shaw and Rapture, Blister, Burn were both finalists for the 2009 and 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, respectively. She has written for the television series Law & Order and "FBI: Most Wanted."
Quiara Alegría Hudes is an American playwright, producer, lyricist and essayist. She is best known for writing the book for the musical In the Heights, and screenplay for its film adaptation. Hudes' first play in her Elliot Trilogy, Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her second play in that trilogy, Water by the Spoonful.
Les Waters is a British theatre director. Waters was the Artistic Director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville. He has directed plays Off-Broadway and also at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Actors Theatre.
W. David Hancock is an American playwright, best known for his plays The Race of the Ark Tattoo and The Convention of Cartography. He is a two-time Obie winner for his works with the Foundry Theatre. His experimental, nonlinear work is known for blurring boundaries between artifice and reality, often through unconventional theatrical spaces and an object-centric dramaturgy. As the critic Elinor Fuchs writes, in Hancock’s work, “…we encounter mystery and authenticity at another level entirely.”
Steven Cosson is a writer and director specializing in the creation of new theater work inspired by real life. He is the founding Artistic Director of the New York-based investigative theater company The Civilians.
Anne Washburn is an American playwright.
Sheri Wilner is an American playwright.
Samuel D. Hunter is an American playwright living in New York City.
Jennifer Haley is an American playwright. She grew up in San Antonio, Texas and studied acting at the University of Texas at Austin for her undergraduate degree. Haley also received a MFA in playwriting at Brown University in 2005, where she worked under American playwright and professor, Paula Vogel. Now living in Los Angeles, Haley is pursuing a career in theatre, film and television.
Kristina "Tina" Satter is an American filmmaker, playwright, and director based in York City. She is the founder and artistic director of the theater company, Half Straddle, which formed in 2008 and received an Obie Award grant in 2013. Satter won a Guggenheim in 2020. Satter was described by Ben Brantley of the New York Times as "a genre-and-gender-bending, visually exacting stage artist who has developed an ardent following among downtown aesthetes with a taste for acidic eye candy and erotic enigmas." Her work often deals with subjects of gender, sexual identity, adolescence, and sports.
Lucas Hnath is an American playwright. He won the 2016 Obie Award for excellence in playwriting for his plays Red Speedo and The Christians. He also won a Whiting Award.
New Dramatists is an organization of playwrights founded in 1949 and located at 424 West 44th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues in the Hell's Kitchen (Clinton) neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.
Jen Silverman is an American playwright, TV writer, and novelist.
Dominique Morisseau is an American playwright and actress from Detroit, Michigan. She has written more than nine plays, three of which are part of a cycle titled The Detroit Project. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.
Fernanda Coppel is a playwright and screenwriter. Her plays have been produced by Second Stage Theatre and the Atlantic Theater Company in New York. She has written for The Bridge,Kingdom, and How to Get Away with Murder.
Clare Barron is a playwright and actor from Wenatchee, Washington. She won the 2015 Obie Award for Playwriting for You Got Older. She was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dance Nation.
Hansol Jung is a South Korean translator and playwright. Jung is a recipient the Whiting Award in drama and three of her plays were listed on the 2015 Kilroys' List. Jung is a member of the Ma-Yi Theater Writers' Lab and was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. In addition to writing several plays, Jung has also written for the television series Tales Of the City.
Mfoniso Udofia is a Nigerian-American storyteller, actor, and educator whose work centers on Nigerian immigrant life within the United States. Celebrated and well known work from Udofia includes: Sojourners,Her Portmanteau,runboyrun and In Old Age --- all plays from within her projected nine-play Ufot Cycle. She also works in film/television as a writer-producer on shows like Little America, Pachinko, A League of Their Own and Showtime's, Let the Right One In.