Sheri Wilner

Sheri Wilner is an award-winning playwright who has been working in the theatre for over twenty-five years. Her plays include Kingdom City, Father Joy, Bake Off, Relative Strangers, Labor Day, Joan of Arkansas, The End, A Tall Order, Hunger, and have been performed and developed at such major theatres as the Guthrie Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe, Williamstown Theatre Festival, the O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, Signature Theatre (D.C.) and the Old Vic/New Voices in London.

She has twice been a co-winner of the prestigious Heideman Award granted by the Actors Theatre of Louisville: in 1998 for Labor Day, which premiered at the 1999 Humana Festival, and in 2001 for Bake Off, which premiered at the 2002 Humana Festival. Bake Off was praised by The New York Times as a “barbed, witty, thoughtful, giggle and snort inducing satire on gender roles” that was “the clear apex” of the festival. In 2015 she adapted Bake Off into the musical Cake Off, which was produced by the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA, and by the Bucks County Playhouse. The Signature production was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award in the Outstanding Original Play or Musical Adaptation category.

In 2020, she wrote her first play for Zoom, LOL OL, which was included in the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Launch Pad’s “Alone, Together” program of Zoom plays, was a finalist in the Maxim Mazumdar New Play Competition, produced by the Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo and published by Dramatic Publishing Company.

Her work has been widely anthologized and published by Dramatists Play Service, Dramatic Publishing Company, Samuel French and Playscripts.com, leading to over five hundred productions of her plays across the United States as well as in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Japan, United Kingdom, and India.

Her playwriting awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting, a Bush Artist Fellowship and two Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowships.

Also a respected playwriting teacher, she is currently an Adjunct Professor for NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing Program. She is also on the faculty of the Dramatists Guild Institute, for whom she serves as the Certificate Program Advisor. She has also taught playwriting for the Playwrights’ Center, PlayPenn, the Creative Center, the Miami-Dade Department of Cultural Affairs, Boston College, Vanderbilt University, and Florida State University’s MFA Dramatic Writing Program.

A graduate of Cornell and Columbia University, she lives in New York City.