LAUREN M. GUNDERSON is one of the most produced playwrights in America since 2015 topping the list thrice including 2022/23. She is a two-time winner of the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award for I and You and The Book of Will, the winner of the Lanford Wilson Award and the Otis Guernsey New Voices Award, a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and John Gassner Award for Playwriting, and a recipient of the Mellon Foundation’s Residency with Marin Theatre Company. She studied Southern Literature and Drama at Emory University, and Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School where she was a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. She is the author of Broadway bound play BILLIE JEAN, about tennis icon Billie Jean King.  Her play The Catastrophist, about her husband virologist Nathan Wolfe, premiered digitally in January 2021. She co-authored the Miss Bennet plays with Margot Melcon, and The Half-Life of Marie Curie premiered off-Broadway and at Audible.com. Her work is published at Playscripts (I and You; Exit Pursued By A Bear; The Taming and Toil And Trouble), Dramatists Play Service (The Revolutionists; The Book of Will; Silent Sky; Bauer, Natural Shocks, The Wickhams and Miss Bennet) and Samuel French (Emilie). Her picture book Dr Wonderful: Blast Off to the Moon is available from Two Lions/Amazon. She is the book writer for musicals with Ari Afsar (We Won’t Sleep), Dave Stewart and Joss Stone (The Time Traveller’s Wife), Joriah Kwamé (Sinister), Kait Kerrigan and Bree Lowdermilk (Justice and Earthrise), and K.ira Stone (Built for This). She is a board member of The Playwrights Foundation. LaurenGunderson.com

CLARE DROBOT  

Artistic Director 

She/Her 

Cdrobot@citytheatrecompany.org 

Clare has been a member of City Theatre's Artistic Leadership since the fall of 2021. She joined the staff at the theater in 2015 serving as the Director of New Play Development and later as Associate Artistic Director, and then Co-Artistic Director. A dramaturg, playwright, and producer Clare has worked in various capacities at Premiere Stages at Kean University, Laura Stanczyk Casting, Williamstown Theatre Festival, The McCarter Theatre, The BE Company, Play Penn, and New Dramatists. Her credits as a playwright include work showcased in Ars Nova’s ANT FEST and through the New Hazlett Theatre’s CSA Series among others. She has dramaturged and developed work with Stephen Belber, Liza Birkenmeier and Jill Sobule, Chisa Hutchinson, Matt Schatz, Anna Ziegler and many more writers and directors. She serves on the boards of the National New Play Network and Brew House Arts and is a member of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh’s Generations Speakers program. She was a member of the inaugural Global Fellows Cohort through the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh and is a graduate of Leadership Pittsburgh (LP XXXVIII). BA/BFA Carnegie Mellon University, member of LMDA.