Erik Ehn

Discipline: Playwriting

Based In: New York, NY

Year at Millay: 1988

Awards/Honors: Award Winner, Theater, The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, The Herb Alpert Foundation/California Institute of the Arts, Santa Monica, CA (2001); Award Winner, Drama, Whiting Award, The Whiting Foundation, New York, NY (1997).

Website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Ehn

Erik Ehn’s plays include The Saint Plays (an ongoing series comprising hundreds of short pieces), Heavenly Shades of Night Are FallingMaria KizitoNo Time Like the PresentWolf at the DoorTailingsBeginnerIdeas of Good and Evil, and an adaptation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. In 2012, his play-cycle Soulographie premiered at La MaMa in New York. He is an artistic associate at San Francisco’s Theatre of Yugen, most recently writing Crazy Horse for them, which combined Noh forms with Native American music and dance. His plays have been produced in San Francisco (Intersection, Thick Description, Yugen), Seattle (Annex, Empty Space), Austin (Frontera), New York (BACA, Whitney Museum), San Diego (Sledgehammer), Chicago (Red Moon), and elsewhere; he has a longstanding collaborative relationship with the Undermain Theater in Dallas. He is co-founder of the Tenderloin Opera Company, San Francisco (with Lisa Bielawa), and a graduate of New Dramatists. Ehn conducts annual trips to Rwanda and Uganda, bringing teams to study the history there, and explore the ways art is participating in recovery from violence. In addition, he produces the Arts in the One World conference yearly, which engages themes of art and social change.