Biography
Sheri Wilner is an award-winning playwright and respected playwriting teacher who has been working in the theatre for over twenty-five years. Her plays include Kingdom City, Relative Strangers, Bake Off, Father Joy, A Tall Order, The End, Joan of Arkansas, and Hunger and have been produced and developed at such theatres as the La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe, Guthrie Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Signature Theatre (DC), Williamstown Theatre Festival, the O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, Bucks County Playhouse, New Georges, 24 Hour Plays, The Old Vic/New Voices, and many others. Additionally, her short plays Relative Strangers and The Miracle of Chanukah have been recorded for the radio and podcast series Playing on Air.
Her work has been widely anthologized and published by Dramatists Play Service, Dramatic Publishing Company, Samuel French, Smith and Kraus, and Playscripts, leading to over four hundred productions of her plays worldwide.
Playwriting awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting, a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, two Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowships and two Heideman Awards, granted by the Actors Theatre of Louisville.
Also an established playwriting teacher, she is currently Associate Chair and Director of MFA Playwriting for the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University. She has taught at several colleges and universities, including New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts B.F.A. Dramatic Writing Program, Vanderbilt University, Boston College, and Florida State University’s M.F.A. Dramatic Writing Program. She has also taught for numerous arts and cultural organizations including the Playwrights’ Center (MN), PlayPenn (PA), the Creative Center (NYC), the Miami-Dade Department of Cultural Affairs and the Dramatists Guild Institute. She serves on the Dramatists Guild Education committee.
She received her M.F.A. in Playwriting from Columbia University, where she studied with Romulus Linney, Tina Howe, and Andrei Serban, whom she assisted on his productions of Cymbeline and Hamlet for the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, and The Taming of the Shrew for the American Repertory Theater. She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University.
