Ken Urban is a playwright and director.

His plays have been produced and developed by Moving Arts, Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, The Flea, Soho Rep, Rude Guerrilla, Annex Theatre, Luna Stage, Target Margin, Son of Semele Ensemble, The Chocolate Factory, The Production Company among others. His plays include I KANT, Nibbler, Halo, The Private Lives of Eskimos, The Absence of Weather (winner of the 2004 Moving Arts Premiere One Act Competition), The Female Terrorist Project, The Happy Sad, and Sense of an Ending. 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) as well as numerous scene and monologue books. He is currently a Playwriting Fellow at Boston's Huntington Theater. He was named one of nytheatre.com's 2007 People of the Year. He will be a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in September 2008.

In addition to directing his own work, he has directed plays by Sarah Kane, Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter. Ken is the Founding Artistic Director of The Committee, a New York-based theatre company that produces "catastrophic theatre." 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 at Harvard University, and in Fall 2008, he will also be Visiting Lecturer of Playwriting at Tufts University.

He creates music as Occurrence and plays in the band The Avon Barksdale.

For a complete resume, click here (pdf).

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Headshot Photo Credit: Tony Scarpetta