Courtney Meaker

Playwright
they/them/theirs

C. Meaker (she/they) is a playwright whose work often explores queerness, feminism, and the end of the world currently based in the Twin Cities.  Growing up in Tennessee, they were naturally obsessed with the horrific and grotesque, which often finds its way into the strange worlds they create whether it’s an unexpected banjo riff as harbinger of death, a screeching banshee that sounds like church bells, or collapsing belief systems ripping through a body.

Meaker’s plays have been performed and developed across the United States, including the Kennedy Center and National New Play Network, Seattle Repertory Theatre, San Francisco Playhouse, Annex Theatre in Seattle, About Face in Chicago and Macha Monkey in Seattle. Meaker’s plays have been published with Dramatic Publishing (Buckshot) and Original Works (Chaos Theory – a play seeking order). They are a Stranger Award Genius Nominee (That’swhatshesaid), Gregory Award Outstanding New Play Nominee (The Lost Girls), and a 2017 Princess Grace semi-finalist (Made of These).

Their play That’swhatshesaid garnered international attention for using the female dialogue and stage directions of the most-produced plays in America (reported by Theatre Communications Group in American Theatre Magazine) as its inspiration and source material.

Other plays of note include: You Must Wear A Hat (Kennedy Center NNPN MFA Playwrights Workshop; Kitchen Dog Theatre New Play Festival; semi-finalist O’Neill Playwrights Conference), Tiny Thin Woman Inside (About Face Babes on Stage Reading Series), Bell at the Back of Her Throat, and Daughter of the Confederacy.

They are a former Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center, an alumna of Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Writers Group, and former Walter E. Dakin Fellow at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. They are a graduate of Knox College and received an MFA in Playwriting from University of Iowa’s Playwrights Workshop. 

They currently teach queer theater and playwriting at Macalester College. In their spare time, they obsessively research monster and zombie theory, DM Dungeons and Dragons, and drink a lot of tea while reading cozy mysteries.