Ken Urban is a playwright and director.

His plays have been produced and developed at The Summer Play Festival @ The Public, The Flea, Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, The Huntington Theatre, Moving Arts, Theatre @ Boston Court, Target Margin, Rude Guerrilla, The Mill @ Stage Left, Son of Semele Ensemble, Theatre of NOTE, Urban Stages, Open Circle Theater, Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, Soho Rep, Annex Theatre and The Chocolate Factory.

Ken is the recipient of the prestigious 2008 L. Arnold Weissberger Prize from the Williamstown Theatre Festival for his play Sense of an Ending. He is also the recipient of a 2007-2009 Huntington Playwriting Fellowship, two summer MacDowell Fellowships, a 2010 Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writers' Room of Boston, a 2006 Tennessee Williams Fellowship at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and he is the winner of the 2004 Moving Arts Premiere One Act Competition. In 2007, he 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, Sense of an Ending, 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). He is featured in numerous monologue and scene compilations. He is currently working on two new plays -- The Correspondent and The Awake -- and a screenplay adaptation of The Happy Sad.

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). He is currently writing an introduction to a new edition of Sarah Kane's Blasted (Methuen). 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 makes music as Occurrence, and is releasing an album called Lonesome Animals this summer. He also sings and plays electronics in the indie rock band The Avon Barksdale. With his band, he runs the Icebox Recordings record label.

For a complete resume, click here (pdf).

For a portrait of the author by Ken Collins: JPEG

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(Headshot Photo Credit: Peter Bellamy)

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