Biography
Mary Gallagher's plays Father Dreams, Little Bird, Chocolate Cake, Buddies, Dog Eat Dog, Love Minus, How To Say Goodbye, De Donde? and Windshook have been published by Dramatists Play Service and Playscripts, Inc. and produced at such theatres as the American Conservatory Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Hartford Stage Company, the Alley Theatre, the Main Street Theatre, the Cincinnati Playhouse, and in NYC at the Vineyard Theatre, the American Place Theatre, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the Women's Project, HOME, the Provincetown Playhouse and the Public Theatre, as well as in many other countries. De Donde? was first published in American Theatre. Windshook was first published in New Plays from Act's Young Conservatory Vol. I and Best Plays By Women 1996. Some of Ms. Gallagher's short plays are anthologized, including Bedtime, Brother, Sandwich, and earlier versions of Perfect.
Her screenplays for Paramount, MGM, HBO, NBC, CBS, Lifetime and Showtime include Nobody's Child, co-written by Ara Watson and directed by Lee Grant (Writers Guild Award, Emmy for Marlo Thomas); Bonds of Love, starring Treat Williams, (Best TV Movie of the Year, Banff International Television Festival); and The Passion of Ayn Rand, starring Helen Mirren, Peter Fonda and Eric Stoltz, which premiered at Sundance in 1999 and aired on Showtime (Emmy for Mirren, Golden Globe for Fonda). In 2002-3 Ms. Gallagher was a staff writer for JoJo's Circus, a hit stop-action-animation show on the Disney Channel.
Fellowships and honors: fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation on the Arts; an NEA/TCG Residency Grant, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Rosenthal New Play Prize, the Berrilla Kerr Award; three production grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; the Writers Guild Award and the Luminas Award from Women in Film.
For six years, Ms. Gallagher was artistic director of Gypsy, a theatre company in New York's Hudson Valley which created site-specific mask-and-puppet theatre, including Premanjali and the 7 Geese Brothers, Ama, and The Scottish Play. In 1996-7, she directed the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, and she currently teaches playwriting and screenwriting at NYU/Tisch School of the Arts. She is a member of Actors & Writers and an alumna of New Dramatists, where she created and moderated the series, "YOU CAN MAKE A LIFE: Conversations with Playwrights," from 1994-2001.
Current projects include new full-length plays, For Your Love and I Know You're the One.
