Herman Daniel Farrell III is an award-winning playwright/screenwriter and noted scholar. He was co-writer of the award winning (Peabody Award, NAACP Image Award) HBO Film Boycott about Martin Luther King, Jr. His plays received world-premiers at The Flea Theater, Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, New York International Fringe Festival, Echo Theater and workshops at Manhattan Theater Club, Crossroads Theater, Working Theater and Primary Stages.
Play productions and awards: civilian, 2011 New York International Fringe Festival; Rome, 2004 New York International Fringe Festival; Portrait of a President, 2002 New York International Fringe Festival (Excellence in Playwriting Award); Solo Goya, Lincoln Center’s Director’s Lab at HERE (NY 1998); Bedfellows, The Flea Theater (NY 1997), The Echo Theater Company (LA 1996) (Drama-Logue Award & Critic’s Choice).
Farrell’s play Odyssey was a Semi Finalist for the 2023 National Playwrights Conference and Supremacy was a Semi Finalist for the 2018 National Playwrights Conference of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. He was Head Writer/Dramaturg of Black Lives Matter: 1619 to Now, based on and inspired by Four Hundred Souls, A Community History of African America 1619 to 2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, that premiered at the University of Kentucky in February of 2022.
Farrell’s work has been recognized and honored by several national arts institutions: New Dramatists (Member Playwright 1995-2002, Joe Calloway Award); NEA Grant (To Mandela at The Working Theater 1998); NEA Grant (There at Primary Stages 1996); MacDowell; 1994, 1995 & 1999 National Playwrights Conference of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center (Bedfellows, Brodkin Scholarship Award, There, 1st Eric Kocher Playwriting Award and Memorial Day).
Farrell is at work on Way of Life: A Biography of Lloyd Richards. Richards was the Tony-Award winning director of Fences by August Wilson and director of more than half of Wilson's great cycle of plays, as well as the individual who discovered August Wilson. Richards was Dean of the Yale School of Drama and Artistic Director of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center where he nurtured and trained many of our finest actors, playwrights, directors, designers, and dramaturgs. Farrell presented a chapter from the book, “A Raisin in the Sun – ‘Making the First Waves’” at the 13th Annual International Conference on Visual and Performing Arts at the Athens Institute for Education and Research in Athens, Greece in June of 2022.
Farrell is a Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance, University of Kentucky. He is president of the Eugene O’Neill Society (2024-26), serves on the Editorial Review Board of The Eugene O’Neill Review, and is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America and alum of New Dramatists. He received a B.A., cum laude, in drama from Vassar College, a J.D. from New York University School of Law and an M.F.A. in playwriting from Columbia University.
