Brooke Berman is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

 and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

. Her play Hunting and Gathering, which premiered at Primary Stages, directed by Leigh Silverman, was named one of the Ten Best of 2008 by New York magazine

New York (magazine)

New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...

. Her memoir, No Place Like Home, was published by Random House

Random House

Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

 in June, 2010.

Background

She studied playwriting at the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at the Juilliard School

Juilliard School

The Juilliard School, located at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, United States, is a performing arts conservatory which was established in 1905...

. As an educator, Berman co-created the “24 With 5 Teaching Collective” at New Dramatists and spent five years as the Director of the Playwrights Unit for MCC Theater’s Youth Company, a free after-school program for NYC youth.

She recently completed a seven-year residency at New Dramatists, where she served on the Board of Directors and developed countless plays. She has received support for her work from the MacDowell Colony

MacDowell Colony

The MacDowell Colony is an art colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, U.S.A., founded in 1907 by Marian MacDowell, pianist and wife of composer Edward MacDowell. She established the institution and its endowment chiefly with donated funds...

, the Corporation of Yaddo

Yaddo

Yaddo is an artists' community located on a 400 acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment."...

, and New Dramatists, and commissions from Arielle Tepper Productions and Children's Theater Company in Minneapolis.

Reception

Her short play "Dancing with a Devil" was a co-winner of the Heideman Award at Actors Theater of Louisville

Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...

 in 1999, presented in “Life Under 30” at the Humana Festival, and nominated for an American Theater Critics Best New Play award. The play was singled out by Mel Gussow

Mel Gussow

Melvyn H. Gussow was an American theater critic, movie critic, and author who wrote for The New York Times for 35 years.-Biography:...

 in The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

and called "the most chilling of the short plays" by Martin Kohn in the Detroit Free Press

Detroit Free Press

The Detroit Free Press is the largest daily newspaper in Detroit, Michigan, USA. The Sunday edition is entitled the Sunday Free Press. It is sometimes informally referred to as the "Freep"...

. It has been published in numerous anthologies. Her short play "Defusion" has been produced in numerous festivals and included in Christine Jones’s "Theater for One" project.

Brooke’s short film All Saints Day, directed by Will Frears, won Best Narrative Short at the Savannah Film Festival and played at the Tribeca Film Festival

Tribeca Film Festival

The Tribeca Film Festival is a film festival founded in 2002 by Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff in a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the consequent loss of vitality in the TriBeCa neighborhood in Lower Manhattan.The mission of the festival...

in 2008.

Awards

• Berilla Kerr Award
• Helen Merrill Award
• Two Francesca Primus Awards
• Two LeCompte du Nuoy awards and a commissioning grant from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture

Plays

Her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing, Playscripts, Backstage Books and Smith & Kraus.

• Hunting and Gathering (Primary Stages)
• Smashing (The Play Company, The O’Neill)
• Until We Find Each Other (Steppenwolf, The O’Neill)
• The Triple Happiness(Second Stage), Sam and Lucy (SPF, Cleveland Playhouse)
• A Perfect Couple (WET), Out of the Water (Cape Cod Theater Project, ARS Nova), and others