Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright and performer whose work has been seen at The Public Theatre, the New York Theatre Workshop, the Soho Repertory Theatre, New Dramatists, The Matrix Theatre Company in Los Angeles, Company One Theatre in Boston, Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, Theater Bielefeld in Germany, and the National Theatre in London. He is a Usual Suspect, a former New York Theater Workshop Playwriting fellow, and an alum of the Soho Rep Writers/Directors Lab, the Public Theater Emerging Writers Group and the Ars Nova Playgroup. His honors include a Princess Grace Award, the Dorothy Strelsin Playwriting Fellowship, the Paula Vogel Award, and a fellowship in playwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2013, he was the recipient of the first-ever Sundance Institute Tennessee Williams Award.
In 2014, his critically acclaimed Off-Broadway plays Appropriate and An Octoroon won the Obie Award for Best New American Play. In November 2014, the Yale Repertory Theatre presented War, which Jacobs-Jenkins wrote while on a Fulbright fellowship in Berlin. In Spring 2015, the Vineyard Theater in New York will present the world premiere of Gloria, which follows the lives of an ambitious group of editorial assistants working in the offices of a Manhattan magazine. Jacobs-Jenkins has also been commissioned to write plays by Manhattan Theater Club and LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater. He has taught at the Tisch School of Arts at New York University and at Princeton University. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
