Kelly Younger

Biography

Kelly Younger is an award-winning playwright with work staged off-Broadway, regionally, and internationally.

New York's Irish Repertory Theatre commissioned Younger to write the stage adaptation of the novel Banished Children of Eveby Peter Quinn, the production of which ran off-Broadway Fall 2010. He is also the author of This World We Know (Winner, Firehouse Theatre Festival of New American Plays; Finalist, National New Play Network Showcase of New Plays; Naked Angels/Furious Theatre) which will premiere Spring 2015, In the Fold (Finalist for the Joanne Woodward/Paul Newman Drama Award), and the full-length drama Tender (nominated for Best New Play IRNE, Finalist for the Laurents/Hatcher Award, and selected of Manhattan Theatre Club's 2011 "7@7" reading series directed by Lynne Meadow). He is currently working with Michelle Kohlos Brooks on a full-length play called Kalamazoo that won the Riva Shriver Comedy Award and will premiere at Bloomington Playwrights Theatre and Pacific Resident Theatre in the Fall of 2014.

Select works for the stage include: Mandate (Snapshots at the Stella Adler Theatre, Hollywood; Last Frontier Theatre Conference; forthcoming publication in Smith and Kraus Best of 2013 anthology, and forthcoming Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival); Once a Marine (PlayFest at Orlando Shakespeare Theater, The Blank Theatre); I Think You Think I Love You (Playscripts; Smith and Kraus anthology Best Plays of 2005); Forgive me, Father (JAC publishing); Lady Gregory's Ingredients (JAC publishing), winner of the Ireland National Lady Gregory Playwriting Award; Off Compass (Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA) winner of the John Gassner New Play Award; Epiphany Cake (Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA, Moving Arts); and Why Wyoming (Three Graces), Critics' Choice Samuel French off-Broadway Festival. Several monologues from Younger's plays appear in various anthologies, and an excerpt of Younger's translation of Trojan Women appears in Beth Henley's play Revelers (Dramatists Play Service). He is a member of The Dramatists Guild of America and associate member of Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, CA.

Younger is also working in the television and feature worlds, developing with DreamWorks Animation Studios, Mandeville Films, Sierra/Affinity, as well as individual projects with Robert Lawrence (Clueless) and Espen Sandberg and Joachim Ronning (Oscar Nominated Kon-Tiki). Younger placed in the top 10% in the 2013 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, and in the top 5% in the 2012 Warner Brothers Television Writers Workshop.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Younger earned an MA in Classics at Loyola University Chicago and PhD in Drama Studies from University College Dublin in Ireland. He is currently a Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University where he leads workshops in Playwriting and teaches courses in Dramatic Literature.

He is managed by Washington Square Arts and Film in New York, and represented by The Gersh Agency in Los Angeles and New York.