about

Ariel Stess is an Obie Award–winning playwright, director, and screenwriter originally from Santa Fe, NM. Her play KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA won the 2024 Obie Award for Playwriting and the 2025 Yale Drama Series Prize. The New Yorker hailed the play as “a superb lo-fi slow burn” with a “spectacularly precise structure.” 2025 Pulitzer Price Winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins called it “dramatic portraiture of the highest order.”

Other works include Heartbreak (The Bushwick Starr/New Georges, Time Out NY Critics’ Pick); I’m Pretty Fucked Up (Clubbed Thumb, five stars Time Out NY); The World My Mama Raised (Clubbed Thumb); and He Ate Quietly Into the Wall (The New Ohio). Her plays have 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.

Stess is currently developing two new stage plays, a novel, and a screenplay. KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA will be published by Yale University Press in 2026.

Ariel is an Affiliated Artist with New Georges, a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a former Core Writer at The Playwrights’ Center, and has held residencies at Yaddo, SPACE on Ryder Farm (with Playwrights Horizons), and Mabou Mines. She’s been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons and Clubbed Thumb. She holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College. She currently teaches in Northwestern University’s Radio/TV/Film department and in the MFA in Writing for the Screen & Stage.

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

Management | TV & Film
Jacob Perlin at Iconoclast
jacob@iconoclast.tv

photo & site design by Winston Mason Riley