Award-Winning Playwright Sheri Wilner Joins Boston College Theatre Deprtment

Award-winning playwright and arts educator Sheri Wilner joins the Boston College Theatre Department this academic year as the Rev. J. Donald Monan, S.J. Professor in Theatre Arts.

Wilner has authored more than 20 full-length and one-act plays, most recently the new musical Cake Off, which premiered in October 2015 at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA and received a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Outstanding Musical Adaptation. It is being performed this summer (August 19 to September 10) at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, PA.

Her plays have been published in more than a dozen anthologies and have been performed at major regional and national theatres. She is currently director of the Dramatists Guild Fellows Program in New York City, which provides a year-long professional development workshop to a select group of emerging playwrights and musical theater writers.

"Sheri Wilner's expertise extends well beyond her highly acclaimed body of work as a playwright," said BC Theatre Department Chair and Associate Professor Crystal Tiala. "She has made it her mission to advocate for gender parity in her field. Her participation in research and subsequent publications bring to light how biased choices made by producers have resulted in significantly fewer opportunities for women. Her presence in our department will fuel some fascinating discussions of both gender and racial parity in the entertainment industry."

Wilner was master playwright for the Miami-Dade Department of Cultural Affairs Playwrights' Development Program, where she conducted a series of weekend workshops over a two-year period with a class of professional Miami playwrights. She has taught playwriting at Vanderbilt University, where she was the Fred Coe Playwright-in-Residence, and Florida State University, where she was head of the playwriting division of the Writing for Stage and Screen MFA program.

Among venues where her plays have been performed are The Old Globe, the Guthrie Theater, The Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights' Conference, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, as well as during several seasons of the Boston Theatre Marathon at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre. Wilner's work also has been produced in Australia, Denmark, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan and the United Kingdom.

At Boston College, Wilner will teach two Theatre Department courses: "Writing Wrongs: Writing the Issue-Based Play" will explore the process of transforming emotional responses to social and political "hot topics" into complex, engaging works for the theater. "Contemporary Female Playwrights" will address the lack of gender parity in American theater, through reading and creatively responding to plays authored by a range of female playwrights.

Wilner, with Boston playwrights Melinda Lopez (Huntington Theatre Company playwright-in-residence) and Kate Snodgrass (Boston Playwrights Theatre artistic director), will write a new, 10-minute play to accompany the opening production of BC's theater season-Waiting for Lefty (October 13-16, 2016), directed by BC Assistant Professor of the Practice Patricia Riggin. In conjunction with that production, Wilner will lead a panel discussion on gender parity in playwriting.

In March, the Theatre Department will produce her play, Kingdom City, (March 22-26, 2017), directed by BC Associate Professor John Houchin. When it premiered two years ago at the La Jolla Playhouse, the play-which follows a female theater director's struggle to produce a provocative play in a conservative, religious town in the mid-west (based on a real event in Fulton, MO)-The Los Angeles Times called it a "potentially major new American play."

Wilner has received several prestigious fellowships including the Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting (2008, Kingdom City), the Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship (2007), The Playwrights Center's Jerome Foundation Fellowship (2005-2007), and the Dramatists Guild Playwriting Fellowship (2000-2001). She has twice been a co-winner of The Actors Theatre of Louisville's Heideman Award for her plays Labor Day (1998) andBake Off (2001), both of which premiered at the annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. She earned a BA in English from Cornell University and an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.

The Monan Professorship in Theatre Arts

The professorship was established in 2007 by a gift to Boston College in honor of University Chancellor and former BC President J. Donald Monan S.J. The position, which also commemorates the late University trustee and benefactor E. Paul Robsham, enables the Theatre Department to bring nationally and internationally known professional theater artists to Boston College to teach and work with undergraduate students. Wilner is the 11th visiting Monan Professor in Theatre Arts, following director/singer Michelle Miller (a 1998 BC alumna); director/actor Tina Packer; actor/playwright Robbie McCauley; director Paul Daigneault (a 1987 alumnus), Broadway music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell and others.[Media Note: A jpg of Sheri Wilner is attached.]

BOSTON COLLEGE THEATRE DEPARTMENT ? In 1865, two years after Boston College opened, theater began at BC. It continued for many years as a student activity under the aegis of the Dramatics Society. In the early 1970s the College of Arts and Sciences established a theater major as part of the Department of Speech, Communications and Theatre. The Robsham Theater Arts Center opened in 1981 as the center of theater production on campus. In 1993 the Theatre Department was established as an independent department. Since then, both the academic and production programs have grown steadily in terms of faculty staff, theater majors, course offerings, and the quality and quantity of productions. For more information go to www.bc.edu/theatre.