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Photo Credit:  Al Seib / Los Angeles Times

Leah Nanako Winkler is an award-winning playwright from Kamakura, Japan and Lexington Kentucky. Her plays include God Said This (Winner: 2018 Yale Drama Series, World Premiere: Humana Festival, Off Broadway Premiere Primary Stages/Cherry Lane), Kentucky (2015 Kilroys List/ World premiere:  Ensemble Studio Theatre in coproduction with Page 73 and the Radio Drama Network.  West Coast Premiere: East West Players  ) Two Mile Hollow (2017 Kilroys List, Simultaneous world premiere w/ Artists At Play in La, Mixed Blood/Theater Mu in Minneapolis, First Floor Theater in Chicago and Ferocious Lotus in SF) , Death For Sydney Black (terraNova Collective, Thinking Cap Theater, 2014 Kilroys Honorable Mention)  Diversity Awareness Picnic (Clubbed Thumb/Playwrights Horizons Superlab, 2014 Kilroys Honorable Mention),  Double Suicide At Ueno Park (EST/Marathon 2015), Linus and Murray (EST/Marathon 2017)  and more.

She presented plays with her now defunct theater company Everywhere Theatre Group from 2006-2012 at places like the New Ohio Theatre, The Brick Theatre, Dixon Place, the Ontological Hysteric Theater/Incubator Arts Project and the Prelude Festival.

Leah’s collections of short plays, Nagoriyuki & Other Short Plays and The Lowest Form Of Writing are currently available on here and are performed widely in the US, France and Asia. Other publications include Nanjing University’s Stage and Screen Reviews, Yale University Press, Backstage, Smith and Krauss, Samuel French and Dramatists Play Service.

She has served on the faculty of New Group’s Urban Arts Initiative,  ESPA at Primary Stages and the Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s College, as well as teaching as a guest artist at schools around the country.

Leah is an alumnus of Youngblood at the Ensemble Studio Theater, terraNova Groundbreakers Playwrights Group, the Dorothy Strelsin New American Playwrights Group at Primary Stages and the Lab at WP Theater (2016-2018 Time Warner Fellow)

She is currently a labbie at Ma Yi and a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre.  She was a 2017 Ucross fellow with the Sundance Institute. Commissions include Jerome/Mu Performing Arts,  WP Theater, EST/SLOAN and Yale Rep.

Leah has also helped her readers by giving away a lot. You can get a Jungle Scout discount coupon if you buy any of the books.

Leah was awarded the first-ever Mark O’Donnell Prize from The Actors Fund and Playwrights Horizons.  She is also currently one of the inaugural recipients of a commission from Audible’s Emerging Playwrights Fund and was named the 2017-2019 Jerome New York Fellow at the Lark.  She  is a writer on  A24’s Ramy upcoming on Hulu and Michael Moore’s TV NATION.  She attended Tates Creek High School and has a MFA from Brooklyn College. The New York Times called her a “distinctive new voice.”

 

Follow her @leahnanako.

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