JUSTIN WARNER is a New York-based playwright, librettist, and lyricist.  He is the librettist for the musical  FAR FROM THE TREE, based on the book by Andrew Solomon, which won a 2024 Richard Rodgers Award.  He is also recent finalist for both the Kleban Prize in Musical Theater and a Jonathan Larson Grant.  FAR FROM THE TREE has been workshopped by the Public Theatre and at Vineyard Arts under the direction of Michael Greif.  His other plays and musicals have been produced in more than 30 cities, including NYC, London, LA, DC, Toronto, San Francisco, Austin, and Miami. He is a member and occasional moderator of the BMI Musical Theater Workshop, and a winner of its Jerry Harrington Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement.  Justin is currently a Clinical Associate Professor of Expository Writing at NYU, and teaches the first-year writing class in the Tisch School of the Arts. 



OTHER PRODUCTIONS AND WORKSHOPS: AMERICAN WHUP-ASS (AlterTheater, San Rafael, CA; Global Age Project winner) and IMPOSTORS (NEUROFest, NYC; Union Theatre, London; Moving Arts, LA; Wichita State University), the children's musical CINDERELLA'S MICE (Vital Theatre, NYC, & tour), for which he wrote the book and additional lyrics, his full evening of short comedies, SCREWUPS: LITTLE PLAYS ABOUT BIG MISTAKES (Manhattan Theatre Source, NYC & Birmingham Festival Theatre, AL), three commissioned Gilbert & Sullivan adaptations for middle school performers, and short plays in theaters all over the US. His musicals THE MASKED ZINFANDEL and THE PASSION OF ED WOOD have been produced, developed, or showcased at the ASCAP/Disney Workshop with Stephen Schwartz, Raw Impressions, Manhattan Musical Theater Lab, the Triad, the York Theatre, and the Greenwich House Music School Theater Lab. His work is published by Samuel French and Original Works, and his monologues are published in many Smith & Kraus anthologies.

OTHER HONORS: As a graduate student, Justin won the Kennedy Center-ACTF's Region II playwriting contest.  He has won the NYC 15-Minute Play competition and the Source Theatre 10-Minute Play competition.  He has also been a finalist for the Princess Grace Award, the Javits Fellowship in the Humanities, the National Award for Short Playwriting, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville/City Theatre's National Ten-Minute Play contest (seven times). 



OTHER CREDITS: Justin was on the Peabody Award-winning writing staff of "Kinetic City Super Crew," a children's radio show funded by the National Science Foundation. He has written for American Theatre, New Scientist, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Popular Science, Newsday, MediaPost, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's "Science Update" podcast, and many others. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Project Y Theatre's Playwrights Group, and an Associate Artist with AlterTheater in San Rafael, California.