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The Dramatic Writing MFA at Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama is built around continuous collaboration with the celebrated student actors, directors and designers of the oldest conservatory in the country. Combining playwriting, screenwriting, and writing for television, this is a rigorous graduate program with a substantial workload. It is for the writer who is prepared to revise a hundred pages overnight and for the leader inventing the theater of a better nation.

Students are encouraged to pursue their professional careers while enrolled in the MFA program, supported by initiatives that provide access to new play development and production opportunities in the field. Full-length plays by graduate playwrights receive workshop productions in the New Works Series. The Sloan/CMU Script Competition awards $35,000 in prizes to current CMU students each year for original screenplays and TV pilots. Graduate students have the opportunity to teach undergraduate courses in playwriting or screenwriting. Alumni have access to an established framework of professional connections.

Guest faculty are a vital presence in the program. Recent guests have included Clare Barron, Sheila Callaghan, Kia Corthron, Erin Courtney, Kristoffer Diaz, Jessica Dickey, Madeleine George, Lucas Hnath, Onalee Hunter Hughes, Aurorae Khoo, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Richard Nelson, Jean-Paul Nickel, Jiehae Park, J.T. Rogers, Cori Thomas, Andrea Thome, Francine Volpe, Anne Washburn, Mac Wellman, and A. Zell Williams.

Recent alumni include Gillian Beth Durkee (EST/Youngblood), Liza Birkenmeier (Public Theater Emerging Writers Group, Ars Nova Play Group, Playwrights Realm Fellow), Leviticus Jelks (Humanitas LA Play Festival, Playwrights Union), Lauren Wimmer (Ars Nova ANT Fest, Playwright's Center), Isabella D'Esposito (Playwrights Realm Fellow), Dan Giles (THE SECOND MAN at NYTW Next Door), Joshua Harmon (BAD JEWS, SIGNIFICANT OTHERS, SKINTIGHT), Mora V. Harris (City Theater Momentum Series, Pittsburgh), Daniel Hirsch (Tête à Tête opera festival, London), and Jordan Barsky (Law & Order SVU). Other alumni are writing for television and film in LA, touring plays for Seder tables and punk rock clubs, and making wild puppet extravaganzas in Texas.

We are committed to an inclusive theater that resists bigotry and oppression. Our community is one of bold artists and bold citizens.

Applications are due January 1. Information at http://drama.cmu.edu/

Rob Handel
Associate Professor of Dramatic Writing
Carnegie Mellon University

Update on CMU alumni in Youngblood, The Playwrights Union, and everywhere

Ensemble Studio Theatre announced that Gillian Beth Durkee (MFA '18) will be a member of Youngblood for the 25th anniversary season of the Obie-winning emerging professional playwrights under the age of 30.

DIRTY DIRTY by Amy Gijsbers van Wijk (MFA '16) has been chosen for development and an industry reading in the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation Playwrights Program.

Leviticus Jelks (MFA '16) has been named a winner of the 2019 Humanitas Play LA Festival and joined Carolyn Kras (MFA '10) as an inductee of the Playwrights Union.

Dan Giles (MFA '15) and Liza Birkenmeier (MFA '12) at New York Theatre Workshop

New York Theatre Workshop announced its fabulous NEXT DOOR AT NYTW season, including the new musical 1969: THE SECOND MAN by Dan Giles (MFA '15) and Jacob Brandt as well as TRAGEDY IN SPADES by Liza Birkenmeier (MFA '12) and director Katie Brook, who have been collaborating since they met at CMU.

THE HOLLOWER at New Light Theater Project

Otto is visited by an investigative podcaster who is half-pig, half-man. She also has a teenaged occult enthusiast houseguest who is making a claymation film about seventeenth century witchcraft in her kitchen. If you guessed that this describes a new play by Liza Birkenmeier (MFA '12), you should rush to New Light Theater Project, where THE HOLLOWER runs through June 9.

Lauren Wimmer '18 at the Playwrights' Center and Ars Nova

Great news: Lauren Wimmer (MFA '18) will be our sixth graduate to be selected as a Core Apprentice at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. Every year, three emerging U.S. playwrights are chosen every year to receive a nine-month mentorship and to workshop a new play. The last student so honored was Savannah Reich in 2016.

Wimmer's thesis production, THE DEATH OF HAYDEN WAVERLY, THE MOST POPULAR PERSON IN THE WORLD, will travel with its Carnegie Mellon artistic team to Ars Nova in New York this summer as part of the notorious ANT Fest.

RADIO ISLAND by Liza Birkenmeier '12 at the Powerhouse Theater

RADIO ISLAND by Liza Birkenmeier (MFA '12) will premiere in New York Stage and Film's mainstage season at the Powerhouse Theater on the campus of Vassar College. Powerhouse is known for nurturing the development of shows like HAMILTON, THE HUMANS, THE HOUSE THAT WILL NOT STAND, THE WOLVES, JUNK, BRIGHT STAR, and THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE.

Fun facts: Rob Handel, who was Liza's teacher at Carnegie Mellon, grew up in Poughkeepsie and was a member of the Powerhouse apprentice company in the 1980's. He returned twenty years later for the mainstage premiere of his own play A MAZE.

Liza will herself return to the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama in 2018, when her commissioned play THE WAY OUT WEST is given its world premiere as part of our own mainstage season.

France-Luce Benson '08 in THE NEW BLACK FEST at the Lark

A staged reading of DEUX FEMMES ON THE EDGE DE LA REVOLUTION by France-Luce Benson (MFA '08) was a part of THE NEW BLACK FEST at the Lark, a festival of diverse and provocative work by Black theater artists from throughout the Diaspora.

BRIC Arts | Media presents work in progress by collaborators from Carnegie Mellon

Brooklyn's BRIC Arts | Media presents BRIClab, a commissioning and residency program that offers local artists time and space to explore and expand the possibilities of their work in music, dance, theater and multi-disciplinary performance. In February, BRIClab will present work-in-progress showings of LOOKING AT YOU, an immersive techno-noir music-theater piece confronting the issue of privacy in our digitized society and the question of how loss of privacy could transform us as a global culture.

LOOKING AT YOU has a score by composer Kamala Sankaram and a libretto by Rob Handel, head of dramatic writing at Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. The project was born out of the the artists' encounter with Alessandro Acquisti's work at Carnegie Mellon’s Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory. Acquisti is collaborating on creating the technology for the piece. LOOKING AT YOU is directed by Kristin Marting, Artistic Director of HERE and Founding Co-Director of Prototype Festival.

Jess Honovich '17 at Actors Theatre of Louisville

HARDWARE by Jess Honovich (MFA '17) was one of the six plays selected from hundreds of submissions to Actors Theatre of Louisville's legendary Ten-Minute Play Contest. It opens tomorrow night. Here's a description: “Two teenage employees work to finish their last tasks before closing time at a B-list computer store in Pittsburgh. HARDWARE is a meditation on work and the understanding that no one really knows anything.”

Sanguine Theatre Company features Gillian Beth Durkee '18

The delightfully named Sanguine Theatre Company's annual Project Playwright: An Exploration of New Work will include LITTLE SOUVENIRS by Gillian Beth Durkee (MFA '18). In the play, an unlikely duo of ghost hunters spends three days in a haunted mansion, while a ghost named Greta grasps for any memory of her death and the life that preceded it. The readings take place January 15 at New York's Access Theater.

HATCHET LADY by Savannah Reich '15 in Minneapolis

Walking Shadow Theatre Company in Minneapolis produced HATCHET LADY, a feminist rock musical about “angel of destruction” Carry Nation by Savannah Reich (MFA '15) with music by Luc Parker. The company first met Reich through their Script Pitch Program: “We put out a call for 100-word proposals, and Savannah Reich's idea was selected by Walking Shadow's company members from a pool of 116 submissions.”

THREE WOMEN IN A WILDFIRE by Julianne Jigour '15 in L.A.

Playground-LA presented new work from Julianne Jigour (MFA '15) as part of their Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival collaboration. Writers were given less than a week to look into their crystal balls to generate original ten-minute plays inspired by the topic, “Probable Future or Possible Future.”

Recent alumni at the HBMG Foundation National Winter Playwrights Retreat

The HBMG Foundation describes its annual retreat in the San Juan Mountains as one that “prioritizes the playwright, not the work being produced.” 2018 residents include Amy Gijsbers van Wijk (MFA '16) and Tracy Held Potter (MFA '15).

Ensemble Studio Theatre LA recently presented Potter's play GROUNDING as part of LA FEST. Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Red Caravan presented Gijsbers can Wijk's DIRTY DIRTY in their Beehive Collective series. The reading benefited Days for Girls, a non-profit which aids in giving women all across the world access to menstrual hygiene products that are hand-made, sustainable, and created for specific living conditions and needs.