Dan O’Brien is an internationally produced and published playwright, poet, nonfiction writer, and librettist whose recognition includes a Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama & Performance Art, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, the Horton Foote Prize for Best New American Play, the PEN Center USA Award for Drama, the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and for poetry the UK’s Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His most recent play, Newtown, premiered at Geva Theatre in 2024, directed by Elizabeth Williamson. Newtown is the recipient of the 2024 Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Theatre Visions Fund Award. The House in Scarsdale: a Memoir for the Stage, premiered at The Theatre @ Boston Court and received the 2018 PEN America Award for Drama. His docudrama about the haunting of war reporter Paul Watson, The Body of an American, has been produced off-Broadway, in London (where it was shortlisted for an Evening Standard Award), and regionally in Chicago, Washington DC, Denver, Hartford, Portland, and elsewhere. His plays have been produced by Primary Stages, Second Stage, Hartford Stage, the Wilma Theater, the Gate Theatre in London, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival, Portland Center Stage, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and many others; and developed at the New Harmony Project, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Sundance Theatre Lab, and elsewhere. Directors he has worked with include Mark Armstrong, Jo Bonney, James Dacre, Michael John Garcés, Bill Rauch, Darko Tresnjak, and Elizabeth Williamson. Residences and fellowships include the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University and the Rockefeller Foundation’s residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy. O’Brien has published six poetry collections in the US and the UK: Flying on Easter (Poetry London Editions), Survivor's Notebook (Acre Books), Our Cancers (Acre Books), War Reporter (CB Editions / Hanging Loose Press), Scarsdale (CB Editions / Measure Press), and New Life (CB Editions / Hanging Loose Press). Dan O’Brien: Plays One is published by Bloomsbury in London. In recent years Dalkey Archive Press has published a collection of his essays, A Story That Happens: On Childhood, Playwriting, & Other Traumas (published in the UK by CB Editions); his memoir, From Scarsdale: A Childhood; and a collection of his plays, True Story: A Trilogy. O’Brien lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actor, writer and producer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter Isobel.