Ken Urban is an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and musician based in New York.
15 Facts About Ken Urban
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Ken Urban is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leads the Music and Theatre Arts Program's dramatic writing program.
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In 2016, Ken Urban was the McGee Visiting Professor of Playwriting at Davidson College.
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Ken Urban began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in fall 2017, and founded the annual Music and Theatre Arts Playwright's Lab, a play festival featuring student-written plays performed by local professional actors.
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Ken Urban's works have been produced by the Huntington Theatre Company, Studio Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Theatre503, The Amoralists Theater Company, Stage Traffic, First Floor Theater, 59E59 Theaters, SpeakEasy Stage Company, The Summer Play Festival at The Public, and Studio 42.
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Ken Urban's plays are published by Dramatists Play Service, and some of his works have been featured in monologue anthologies.
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Ken Urban is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, and an affiliated writer at the Playwrights' Center.
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Ken Urban was the Founding Artistic Director of The Committee, a New York-based theatre company that produced "catastrophic theatre" including the first workshop production of Sarah Kane's Cleansed.
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In 2017, Ken Urban wrote the screenplay for the feature-film adaptation of his play The Happy Sad, which screened internationally at over 25 film festivals.
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In 2009, Urban won the 2008 L Arnold Weissberger Award, given each year by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, for his play Sense of an Ending.
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Ken Urban has previously won the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Huntington Theater Playwriting Fellowship, MacDowell Colony Fellowships, the Dramatist Guild Fellowship, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship.
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Ken Urban has earned additional artist residencies at Headlands and Djerassi.
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Ken Urban's plays are published by Dramatists Play Service in the United States, and by Methuen in the United Kingdom and Europe.
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Ken Urban is a co-founder of the band Occurrence, which features vocalists Cat Hollyer and Johnny Hager.
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The Boston Globe and news radio WBZ covered its release, with the Globe saying "something tells us Ken Urban's downbeat take on the holidays won't be a hit".