Laura Marks

Laura Marks is a recent graduate of Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace playwriting program and an alumna of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. Her play about the foreclosure crisis, Bethany, was produced Off-Broadway at City Center Stage II by the Women’s Project (directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, starring America Ferrera) and received two Lucille Lortel nominations, for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Lead Actress. Bethany won the Leah Ryan Prize for Emerging Women Writers, was a Susan Smith Blackburn finalist, was published in Methuen’s American Next Wave anthology in the UK and was chosen by John Guare as runner-up for Yale’s David C. Horn Prize. Other honors include a Lilly Award, a Helen Merrill Award and an award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her other plays include Mine (Princess Grace finalist; produced by the Gift Theatre, Chicago) and Gather at the River (upcoming workshop at TheatreWorks, Palo Alto). Her work has been developed at the Public, Juilliard, the Women’s Project, the Black Dahlia, Manhattan Theatre Club, the Royal Exchange Theatre (UK), HighTide Festival Theatre (UK), the Wilma Theater, the Lark, Steppenwolf, Partial Comfort, Prospect Theater, Naked Angels, Synchronicity, Reverie Productions et al. and she currently holds a commission from South Coast Repertory. She’s a native of Kentucky, now living in New York.