about

Ariel Stess is an Obie Award–winning playwright and the winner of the 2025 Yale Drama Series Prize for her play KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA. She is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, an affiliated artist of the Playwrights’ Center, and a New Georges Affiliated Artist. Her work has been developed or produced at Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, The Bushwick Starr, New Georges, Mabou Mines, Brave New World Rep, Rivendell Theatre, and The Lark.

Select productions include KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA (self-produced with support from New Georges; presented by The Tank; directed by Meghan Finn, NYC — winner of the 2024 Obie Award for Playwriting and the 2025 Yale Drama Series Prize, and forthcoming from Yale University Press), The World My Mama Raised (Clubbed Thumb, dir. Kip Fagan, NYC), Heartbreak (The Bushwick Starr, co-produced by New Georges, dir. Ariel Stess, NYC), I’m Pretty Fucked Up (Clubbed Thumb, dir. Kip Fagan, NYC), and He Ate Quietly Into the Wall (The New Ohio, dir. Morgan Green, NYC).

Her play KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA won the 2024 Obie Award for Playwriting, the 2025 Yale Drama Series Prize (selected by Pulitzer Prize–winner Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins), and will be published by Yale University Press. It was an O'Neill National Playwrights Conference Finalist and also received an Honorable Mention from the Relentless Award.

Ariel has been a resident at Yaddo Artists' Colony, SPACE on Ryder Farm with Playwrights Horizons, and Mabou Mines Resident Artist Program. She was a New Georges Audrey Resident, a Semifinalist for the P73 Playwriting Fellowship, a McKnight National Residency and Commission Finalist at the PWC, and a two-time PONY nominee. She has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons and Clubbed Thumb.

Born and raised in New Mexico, Ariel holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. She has taught at NYU, Brooklyn College, Borough of Manhattan Community College, and SUNY Purchase, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Northwestern University’s Radio/TV/Film department, where she teaches playwriting and screenwriting. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Culturebot.

Representation | Theatre
Bonnie Davis
Bret Adams, LTD
bdavis@bretadamsltd.net

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