Clay & Water 2023

Kim Euell is an award-­winning playwright, dramaturg and educator who is dedicated to developing socially relevant new work for the American stage. She is the Resident Dramaturg at San Francisco’s Zaccho Dance Theater, a Company Member at Penumbra Theater Company, and an Affiliated Writer with the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. She teaches courses (including playwriting), for the Theater and Digital Cinema Programs at Southern Oregon University.

Kim’s plays have been developed and performed at The University of Massachusetts and the University of Iowa, Cape Town’s Magnet Theater (South Africa), Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Black Swan Workshop, Portland’s Imago Theater, L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum, Hartford Stage, The Los Angeles Theater Center, Detroit’s Plowshares Theater Company, Manhattan’s New Perspectives Theater, Seattle’s Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, Actor’s Theater of Louisville and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. Penumbra Theater’s production of her play, The Diva Daughters DuPree was named “Outstanding New Show of the Year” by critics at the Star-Tribune. A winner of the Theodore Ward Prize, “Divas” is in the Best Black Plays anthology published by Northwestern University Press. Kim edited Plays from the Boom Box Galaxy, the first play anthology devoted to theater informed by Spoken Word poetry and the Hip Hop aesthetic for TCG Publications.

Kim has worked as a new play dramaturg at The Humana Festival in Louisville, Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor Residency, The Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis, The Sundance Theater Lab, The Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, The Taper’s New Work Festival, South Coast Rep’s Hispanic Playwrights Project and many others. She has headed play development programs at the Mark Taper Forum, The Tony Award-­winning Hartford Stage and Danny Glover’s Robey Theatre where she was the California Art’s Council’s Playwright in Residence. At Hartford Stage, Kim founded the Voices! Program that commissioned, developed and presented new plays by underrepresented writers. Voices! yielded the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Water By the Spoonful by Quiara Alegria Hudes. Kim also served as director of the New America Playwrights Festival at San Jose Rep and the Juneteenth Festival of New Plays at Center Theater Group in Los Angeles.

Kim’s many years of coaching professional and emerging playwrights allowed her to develop her own unique and highly effective approach to teaching the craft of playwriting. From 2014-­2018 she was Playwright in Residence at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has also taught playwriting for VONA the only multi-­genre writing program specifically for writers of color, which was named one of “the 10 Best Writing Conferences in the U.S.” by Poets & Writers Magazine. Other institutions where she has taught include the University of Pennsylvania, Wesleyan University, The University of Miami and the University of Iowa. Kim has conducted annual playwriting workshops in South Africa for three years as well as a month long intensive workshop in Kenya, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. She has conducted playwriting workshops for young writers from around the world for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.

Kim has served as a panelist and site evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. She has served as a script evaluator and panelist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Playwriting Fellowship Awards, the New Jersey Arts Council’s Playwriting Fellowship Awards, The Alpert Awards in the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, Pew Charitable Trust and others. Kim is an Honors graduate of Stanford University and an alumna of the University of Iowa’s Playwrights Workshop, where she was a Dean’s Fellow and a Stanley International Research Fellow. Kim was honored to be the August Wilson Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Theatre Dept. and A MacArthur Scholar in their Development Studies & Social Change Program.