Marcus Gardley is an ensemble member playwright at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and an assistant professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Brown University.
15 Facts About Marcus Gardley
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Marcus Gardley is among a new group of young African-American playwrights who have come to prominence during the "Age of Obama".
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Marcus Gardley has cited the Harlem art scene as influential to his work, with James Baldwin as a primary inspiration.
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In 2013 Gardley began a three-year term as the Playwright in Residence at Victory Gardens Theater, through the National Playwright Residency Program, funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and administered by HowlRound.
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In 2013, Marcus Gardley contributed a short play to The New Black Fest as part of a collaborative project titled Facing Our Truth: 10-Minute Plays on Trayvon, Race and Privilege, premiering in New York City.
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Marcus Gardley's piece, titled No More Monsters Here, features a black psychiatrist who prescribes that a white woman live as a black man for three days as a cure for her "negroidphobia".
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Marcus Gardley served as a staff writer on the Amazon Prime series Z: The Beginning of Everything, and later as an executive story editor and writer for The Chi, which premiered on Showtime in 2018.
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Marcus Gardley was the recipient of the Helen Merrill Award in 2008 and the Kesselring honor award.
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Marcus Gardley's plays This World in a Woman's Hands and Love is a Dream House in Lorin have been named as the best plays in Bay Area theater, with Love is a Dream House in Lorin being nominated for the National Critics Steinberg New Play Award.
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Marcus Gardley is the author of the box: play about the prison industrial complex, which was premiered in Brooklyn in 2014 by The Foundry; black odyssey, which premiered at The Denver Theater Center the same year; The Road Weeps, the Well Runs Dry, which had a national tour in 2013; and Dance of the Holy Ghosts, which premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2004.
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Marcus Gardley is the recipient of the 2014 Glickman Award for his play The House That Will Not Stand, which was commissioned and produced by Berkeley Rep.
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Marcus Gardley was the 2013 USA James Baldwin Fellow and the 2011 PEN Laura Pels award winner for Mid-Career Playwright.
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Marcus Gardley has won the San Francisco Bay Area's Gerbode Emerging Playwright Award, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre Award, the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Scholarship, and the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize.
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Marcus Gardley is a member of New Dramatists, The Dramatists Guild and the Lark Play Development Center.
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Marcus Gardley was selected as one of 50 talented playwrights for audiences to follow by the Dramatists Magazine.