Melissa James Gibson is a Canadian-born playwright based in New York. The daughter of former British Columbia Liberal MLA Gordon Gibson and journalist Valerie Gibson, Gibson grew up in North Vancouver. She graduated from Columbia University and from the Yale School of Drama with an M.F.A. in Playwriting. After graduating, she worked as a college counselor at the arts-oriented Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights, where her daughter, Celia Frey, and son, Griffin Frey, attended. She is currently working on commissions for the La Jolla Playhouse and The Adirondack Theatre Festival. She has received fellowships from the Jerome Foundation and MacDowel. The New York Times theatre critic Charles Isherwood wrote that, with her play This, Gibson “graduates into the theatrical big leagues with this beautifully conceived, confidently executed and wholly accessible work.” In 2002, she won an Obie for playwriting, Kesseiring Prize, in 2002 she received the Whiting Award, and in 2011 the Steinberg Playwright Award.
Melissa Gibson
Studios
Wood
Melissa Gibson worked in the Wood studio.
Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…