Photo: Peter Bellamy

DAN O’BRIEN was recently the Hodder Fellow playwright-in-residence at Princeton. He is currently the inaugural Djerassi Fellow in Playwriting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He lives in Los Angeles and New York City with his wife, the comedienne Jessica St. Clair.

Dan’s play The Voyage of the Carcass had its off-Broadway premier recently with Tony winner Dan Fogler at SoHo Playhouse, directed by Randy Baruh and produced by Stage 13, of which Dan O’Brien is a founding member. Previous productions of Dan’s work include The Dear Boy at Second Stage Theatre (directed by Michael John Garcˇs), Moving Picture at Williamstown Theatre Festival (Darko Tresnjak), Key West at Geva Theatre Center (Skip Greer), Am Lit at Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Marathon of One Act Plays (Kevin Confoy), The Voyage of the Carcass with P. 73 Productions at HERE Arts Center (Alyse Rothman), the short play Her First Screen Test at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Lamarck at Perishable Theatre, California Repertory Company, and Pittsburgh Repertory Theatre.

His plays have been developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, PlayLabs at the Playwrights’ Center, New Harmony Project, Soho Theatre London, Roundabout Theatre Company, American Conservatory Theatre, Atlantic Theater Company, New York Theatre Workshop, Primary Stages, Magic Theatre, Black Dahlia Theatre Company, The Play Company, Rattlestick, Lark Theatre, Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab, and Manhattan Theatre Club, where he was a playwriting fellow-in-residence in 1999-2000. He has received playwriting commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Geva Theatre Center, Trinity Repertory Company; and residencies and fellowships from Yaddo, O’Neill Playwrights Conference, New Harmony Project, Sewanee the University of the South, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation.

Awards include the Osborn Award by the American Theatre Critics Association; the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award, the National Student Playwriting Award, and the National AIDS Award for Playwriting (Kennedy Center / ACTF). His work has been published by Samuel French, Dramatic Publishing, and Playscripts Inc., and in numerous anthologies and journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation and Blackbird. Dan also writes fiction and poetry: his work has been published in the anthology 25 And Under / Fiction (Doubletake / W.W. Norton), and the journals StoryQuarterly, Quarterly West, Greensboro Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Louisville Review, Radical Society, Ellipsis, Salt Hill.

Dan is a Core Member of the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. He has taught playwriting at Princeton University, SUNY Purchase, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Brown University, Primary Stages, Spaulding University MFA Program, Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and in his own private workshop in New York City. He has frequently been a guest artist at Middlebury College and Brown University. In 2002-03, and again in 2005, he was the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at Sewanee the University of the South. He holds a B.A. in English & Theatre from Middlebury College, and a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting & Fiction from Brown University.