Name Ken Urban Books Sense of an Ending Plays The Correspondent | Movies The Happy Sad | |
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Similar People Rodney Evans, Maria Dizzia, Esra Saydam, Susan Shopmaker | ||
Ken urban video
Ken Urban is a playwright, screenwriter, director and musician whose plays have been produced across the country and in the UK. He recently became a senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, leading the playwriting program at the school. Urban was born in New Jersey in 1974.
Contents
- Ken urban video
- A Guide for the Homesick Ken Urban on how the UK made him a playwright
- Plays
- TV and Film
- AwardsRecognition
- Publishing and Writing
- Education and Teaching
- Music
- References
In the 2017-18 Season, two of Urban’s plays will have world premieres: A Guide for the Homesick opens at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston (directed by Colman Domingo) in October 2017; and The Remains will receive its world premiere at Studio Theatre in Washington, DC (directed by Artistic Director David Muse) in May 2018.
A Guide for the Homesick: Ken Urban on how the UK made him a playwright
Plays
Ken Urban's plays include Sense of an Ending, The Correspondent, A Future Perfect, The Awake and The Happy Sad. His most recent, Nibbler, was produced off-Broadway earlier this year by The Amoralists.
Urban’s work has also been produced by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 59E59 Theatres, The Summer Play Festival at The Public Theater, and Studio 42 (all New York), Theatre503 in London, First Floor Theater in Chicago, and SpeakEasy Stage Company in Boston. Urban’s works have been developed at Playwrights Horizons and The Civilians’ R&D Grou (both New York), Donmar Warehouse (London), Huntington Theatre Company (Boston), Williamstown Theatre Festival (Williamstown, Mass.), and the Theatre @ Boston Court (Pasadena, Calif.).
He is a Resident Playwright at New Dramatists and an Affiliated Writer at the Playwrights’ Center. He was the Founding Artistic Director of The Committee, a New York-based theatre company that produced “catastrophic theatre" including the first workshop production of Sarah Kane's Cleansed.
TV and Film
Urban’s TV pilot The Art of Listening recently was optioned by ITV Studios America and Christina Wayne/Assembly Entertainment. He wrote the screenplay for the feature-film adaptation of his play The Happy Sad, which screened internationally at over 25 film festivals.
Awards/Recognition
In 2009, Urban won the 2008 L. Arnold Weissberger Award, given each year by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, for his play Sense of an Ending. His other awards and recognitions have come from New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Huntington Theater Playwriting Fellowship, MacDowell Colony Fellowships, Headlands Artist Residency, Djerassi Artist Residency, Dramatist Guild Fellowship, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship.
Publishing and Writing
Ken Urban’s plays are published by Dramatists Play Service in the United States, and by Methuen in the United Kingdom and Europe, and they have been featured in numerous monologue anthologies.
His essays on theater have appeared in Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights, Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights, Contemporary Theatre Review, Modern Drama, A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama, Cool Britannia: British Political Drama in the 1990s, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.
Education and Teaching
Urban is a graduate of Bucknell University (B.A.) and Rutgers University, where he holds a Ph.D. in English literature, Urban has taught playwriting, screenwriting, academic writing and dramatic literature at those institutions, as well as Harvard University, Princeton University, Tufts University and Davidson College.
He became a senior lecturer at MIT in fall 2017, where he leads the playwriting program at the school.
In 2016 he was McGee Visiting Professor of Playwriting at Davidson College in Davidson, N.C.
Music
Urban plays in the band Occurrence, which features vocalists Cat Hollyer and Johnny Hager. The band is currently recording its sixth album. Its 2016 release "The Past Will Last Forever" received strong reviews including from Atwood Magazine and Clicky Clicky Music.