Ken Urban is a playwright and director.

Ken’s plays have been produced at The Flea, Moving Arts, Target Margin, Theatre of NOTE, Rude Guerrilla, and The Chocolate Factory, among others. His work has been developed at The Huntington, Playwrights Horizons, Son of Semele Ensemble, Urban Stages, Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, Soho Rep and Annex Theatre. Ken is the recipient of a 2007-2009 Huntington Playwriting Fellowship, a 2008 MacDowell Residency, a 2006 Tennessee Williams Fellowship at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and he is the winner of the 2004 Moving Arts Premiere One Act Competition. His play Sense of an Ending is the winner of the prestigious the 2008 L. Arnold Weissberger Prize (nominated by the Huntington Theatre) given by the Williamstown Theatre Festival. In 2007, he was commissioned by Target Margin to adapt Aristophanes’ The Wasps, and was named one of nytheatre.com's People of the Year. His plays include I KANT, Nibbler, Halo, The Private Lives of Eskimos, The Absence of Weather, The Female Terrorist Project, and The Happy Sad. His work has been published in New York Theatre Review (Edited by Book Stowe, with an introduction by Aleks Sierz), and Plays and Playwrights 2002 (Edited by Martin Denton). A number of his plays are available in acting editions from Original Works Publishing and he is featured in numerous monologue and scene compilations.

In addition to directing his own work, he has directed plays by Sarah Kane, Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter. Ken founded The Committee, a New York-based theatre company that produces "catastrophic theatre,"and served as the artistic director from 2002 to 2008. His critical essays about theatre have appeared in Performing Arts Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Modern Drama, Theater (Yale), Contemporary Theatre Review, and the anthologies Cool Britannia: British Political Drama in the 1990s (Palgrave), and A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Theatre (Blackwell). In 2005, his article "Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia" was translated into Czech in the journal Svet a Divadlo. He graduated with honors from Bucknell University and earned his Ph.D in English Literature at Rutgers University. Ken has taught drama and writing at Rutgers University and Bucknell University. He currently teaches theatre and playwriting at Harvard University and Tufts University.

He is currently working on three new stage plays (The Correspondent, Albert; or The Conqueror, The Awake) and a screenplay. Nibbler opens at Theatre of NOTE in Los Angeles in November. He is the lead singer and keyboardist in the Boston band The Avon Barksdale, and makes electronic music as Occurrence.

For a complete resume, click here (pdf).

For an academic CV, click here (pdf).

For a press headshot of the author, click Hi-Res 1 Hi-Res 2 Lo-Res 1 Lo-Res 2

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Headshot Photo Credit: Tony Scarpetta