Heather McDonald (born 1959) is an American playwright, director, librettist, and professor. [1] [2]
Heather McDonald (born 1959) is an American playwright, director, librettist, and professor. [1] [2]
Mcdonald is originally a Canadian citizen. She graduated from the University of Florida with a BFA in English. She is an MFA graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Heather McDonald has published eight plays, two screenplays, and a libretto. Her plays have been performed nationally and all over the world. [3]
She has attended the Sundance Institute twice, first as a director, and most recently as a playwright for the 2010 Playwrights Retreat at Ucross. [4]
McDonald has been a regular teacher at the Kennedy Center Intensive at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The program is a two-week session of writing workshops and discussions about the business of playwriting. [5]
McDonald is a full-time professor at George Mason University. Her courses include playwriting workshop, advanced playwriting, the screenplay, and advanced playwriting workshop. [6]
McDonald pioneered the Ten-Minute Play Festival, where students produce, direct, and act in ten-minute plays written by students. [7]
Heather McDonald was an artistic associate of the Theater of the First Amendment. [8]
"Since 1990, TFA has produced 44 full productions and numerous staged readings of new work. Our productions have won 12 Helen Hayes Awards (DC’s equivalent of the Tony Awards) out of 37 nominations. Many plays originating at TFA have been published, produced nationally and internationally, televised and broadcast, or recorded as award-winning original soundtrack CDs". [9]
In June 2011, TFA hosted Playwrights in Mind: A National Conversation, [10] a playwrights conference. It was sponsored by the Dramatists Guild and featured many celebrated playwrights, including David Ives, Stephen Schwartz, Mame Hunt, Molly Smith, Christopher Durang, Emily Mann, and Julia Jordon.
She resides in Baltimore.
Paula Vogel is an American playwright who received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play How I Learned to Drive. A longtime teacher, Vogel spent the bulk of her academic career – from 1984 to 2008 – at Brown University, where she served as Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor in Creative Writing, oversaw its playwriting program, and helped found the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium. From 2008 to 2012, Vogel was Eugene O'Neill Professor of Playwriting and department chair at the Yale School of Drama, as well as playwright in residence at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
Marsha Norman is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play 'night, Mother. She wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway musicals as The Secret Garden, for which she won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, and The Red Shoes, as well as the libretto for the musical The Color Purple and the book for the musical The Bridges of Madison County. She is co-chair of the playwriting department at The Juilliard School.
Jeanine Tesori is an American composer and musical arranger best known for her work in the theater. She is the most prolific and honored female theatrical composer in history, with five Broadway musicals and five Tony Award nominations. She won the 1999 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play for Nicholas Hytner's production of Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center, the 2004 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music for Caroline, or Change, and the 2015 Tony Award for Best Original Score for Fun Home, making them the first female writing team to win that award. She was named a Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist twice for Fun Home and Soft Power.
Douglas Wright is an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 2004 for his play I Am My Own Wife. He also wrote the books to the Broadway musicals Grey Gardens in 2006, The Little Mermaid in 2007, Hands on a Hard Body in 2012, and War Paint in 2017. His play Good Night, Oscar will make its Broadway debut in 2023.
Rebecca Gilman is an American playwright.
Sarah Ruhl is an American playwright, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Eurydice (2003), The Clean House (2004), and In the Next Room (2009). She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Two of her plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play. In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Recording at the 2023 Grammy Awards.
Lynn Nottage is an American playwright whose work often focuses on the experience of working-class people, particularly working-class people who are Black. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: in 2009 for her play Ruined, and in 2017 for her play Sweat. She was the first woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times.
Tarell Alvin McCraney is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. He is the chair of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble.
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.
Hilly Hicks Jr. is an American playwright and screenwriter.
Arthur M. Jolly is an American playwright and screenwriter. In 2006, he was awarded an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for his comedy The Free Republic of Bobistan.
Adam Frederick Goldberg is an American television and film producer, and writer. Goldberg is best known as the creator and showrunner of The Goldbergs, a television sitcom based on his childhood in which he is portrayed by Sean Giambrone. He also created and led the sitcoms Breaking In, Imaginary Mary, and Schooled, a spin-off of The Goldbergs.
Stephen Karam is an American playwright, screenwriter and director. His plays Sons of the Prophet, a comedy-drama about a Lebanese-American family, and The Humans were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012 and 2016, respectively. The Humans won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play, and Karam wrote and directed a film adaptation of the play, released in 2021.
Lauren Yee is an American playwright.
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.
Matthew Paul Olmos is an American playwright from Los Angeles, California. Now living in Brooklyn, New York, he is most well known for his play the living'life of the daughter mira, which won Arizona Theatre Company's 2015 National Latino Playwriting Award and was named one of the Best Unproduced Latin@ Plays 2017 by the 50 Playwrights Project., and so go the ghosts of mexico a three-play cycle about the US-Mexico drug wars.
Harrison David Rivers is an American playwright. Rivers' work has won him the Relentless Award, a GLAAD Media Award, a McKnight Fellowship for Playwrights, a Jerome Foundation Many Voices Fellowship, an Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship, a Van Lier Fellowship and the New York Stage & Film's Founders Award. He is based in Saint Paul, Minnesota and is married to Christopher Bineham.
Ronan Noone is an Irish-American playwright based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Jeremy O. Harris is an American playwright, actor, and philanthropist, known for his plays "Daddy" and Slave Play. The latter received 12 nominations at the 74th Tony Awards, breaking the record previously set by the 2018 revival of Angels in America for most nominations for a non-musical play. Harris was the winner of the 2018 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, given by the Vineyard Theatre in New York City. A profile in the New York Times said that Harris's "ability to render subconscious trauma into provocative theatrical expression, as potentially unsettling as entertaining, has earned him a lot of attention in a very short time." Out called him "the queer black savior the theater world needs."
Josh Wilder is an American playwright whose work has been performed regionally across the United States and is best known for The Dandelion Plays, a work-in-progress play cycle inspired by Wilder’s experience growing up in inner city Philadelphia. His play, Leftovers, won The Great Plains Theatre Conference’s Holland New Voices Playwright Award in 2014. Wilder received a B.F.A. in acting from Carnegie Mellon and an M.F.A. in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama.
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