GLORIA

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a Brooklyn-based playwright, producer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. He draws from a range of contemporary and historical theatrical genres to engage frankly with complicated issues around identity, family, class, and race. Many of Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays use a historical lens to satirize and comment on modern culture, particularly the ways in which race and class are negotiated in both private and public settings. Although the provocation of his audience is purposeful, Jacobs-Jenkins’s creation of unsettling, shocking, often confrontational moments is not gratuitous; these elements are of a piece with the world he has established on stage and in the service of the story he is telling. (Playmakers Repertory Company)

His plays include Girls, Everybody (Signature Theatre), War (Yale Rep; Lincoln Center/LCT3), Gloria (Vineyard Theatre), Appropriate (Obie Award; Signature Theatre), An Octoroon (Obie Award; Soho Rep, Theatre for a New Audience), and Neighbors (The Public Theater). Most recently he was the showrunner, executive producer, and writer for Hulu/FX’s drama series, “Kindred,” based on Octavia E. Butler’s groundbreaking novel.

A Premiere Resident playwright at Signature Theatre, his honors include USA Artists, Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellowships, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award and he currently serves as Vice President of the Dramatists Guild council. He teaches at Yale University. (Signature Theatre)