Kelly Younger

KELLY YOUNGER is an award-winning playwright with work staged off-Broadway, regionally, and internationally.
This World We Know won the New American Play Festival and premiered at The Firehouse Theatre in Richmond, VA. It was also a finalist for the National New Play Network Showcase of New Plays and received development support from Naked Angels/Furious Theatre. He co-wrote a hit comedy Kalamazoo with Michelle Kholos Brooks that won the Riva Shriver Comedy Award and premiered for a sold-out, extended run at Bloomington Playwrights Project. Pacific Resident Theatre in Los Angeles ran a three-time extended, 6-month run, followed by a record-breaking run at Adirondack Theatre Festival, July 2015, with additional productions planned for the upcoming season.
Younger’s short play, Mandate (Samuel French, 2015) won the 39th Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival; premiered at the Stella Adler Theatre in Hollywood; participated in the Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Alaska; ran at City Theatre Miami’s Summer Shorts Festival and in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; was turned into a radio play by for Utah Public Radio; was a finalist for the Heidemann Award from the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival; ran at the Barrington Stage Company; and has thus far received productions as far away as Dubai, UAE. Other short plays include Let’s Get Physical (Stella Adler Theatre, Hollywood; City Theatre, Miami; Edinburgh Fringe Festival), and Best Lei’d Plans (Stella Adler Theatre, Hollywood, starring Markie Post and Mindy Sterling.)
New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre commissioned Younger to write the stage adaptation of the novel Banished Children of Eve by Peter Quinn, the production of which ran 57 sold-out performances off-Broadway in Fall 2010. He is also the author of The Rorschach Play, which was a finalist for the Joanne Woodward/Paul Newman Drama Award and received development support from Rogue Machine Theatre in Los Angeles. His play Tender was nominated for Best New Play IRNE award, was a finalist for the $150,000 Laurents/Hatcher Award, and was selected for Manhattan Theatre Club’s “7@7” reading series, directed by Lynne Meadow.
Younger is also working in the television and feature worlds, developing with Mandeville Films at Disney Studios; Josephson Entertainment; Gil Netter Productions; and DreamWorks Animation Studios; as well as individual projects with Robert Lawrence (Clueless) and Espen Sandberg and Joachim Ronning (Oscar Nominated Kon-Tiki). Younger placed in the top 10% in the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, and in the top 5% in the Warner Brothers Television Writers Workshop.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Younger earned an MA in Classics at Loyola University Chicago and PhD in Drama Studies from University College Dublin in Ireland. He is currently the resident playwright in the Department of English at Loyola Marymount University. He is a proud member of The Dramatists Guild of America and an associate member of Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, CA.
He currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife, two children, and a dog named Sean.