Introducing the Playwright of Proclivities - Kirsten Greenidge

Kirsten Greenidge is a playwright from Boston, Massachusetts.  Growing up, she regularly wrote and produced plays with the other kids in her neighborhood, as well as her sisters and began taking theatre classes at Wheelock Family theatre while still in high school.  She attended Wesleyan University as a United States History Major, where she studied playwrighting with Darrah Cloud, and won her first playwrighting award. Soon after, Kirsten moved on to the Playwright’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she studied with Naomi Iizuka, Erik Ehn, Sydne Mahone, among others.

At Iowa, Kirsten developed her voice.  More often than not, Kirsten’s work explores the intersections of race, class, and gender and seeks to place stories and language that are inherently theatrical on the American stage.  She seeks to create more multidimensional roles for underrepresented actors of color, more roles for women, and more plays that challenge mainstream audiences and provoke change.

Greenidge is known for such works as The Luck of the Irish, Baltimore and the Obie Award-winning and Lucille Lortell-nominated Milk Like Sugar. A PEN/Laura Pels Playwrighting Award recipient, she is honored to have been named Playwright Laureate of Boston and is currently a Howlround/Mellon Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Company One Theatre, in Boston, where she facilitates Company One’s Volt Writer’s Lab and its Open Write Playwrighting series. She is also a Huntington Playwrighting Fellow and a New Dramatists alum.

Kirsten is Assistant Professor of Theatre at the School of Theatre at Boston University and lives in Westborough, Massachusetts with her husband, two children, sister, and mother in their writing compound named Gwendolyn.