Playwright Sarah Mantell’s plays include Everything That Never Happened, The Good Guys, Tiny, Fight Call, and Mrs. Galveston. Their plays have been produced and developed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Boston Court Pasadena, The Playwrights Realm, Artists Repertory Theatre, Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, The Yale Cabaret, and Seattle Repertory Theatre.
Sarah is under commission with Playwrights Horizons and Geva Theatre Center and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Wildacres, Jentel, Hedgebrook, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. Mantell was a Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship, received a Toulmin grant, an Edgerton Foundation grant, was first runner-up for the Leah Ryan FEWW award, was a finalist for the Heideman Award, and received two nominations for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award. Their published essays include “Touch the Wound, But Don’t Live There” in American Theatre Magazine and “On the Loss of a Play and Things Worth Losing” in 3Views.
Sarah has taught at Occidental College, Wesleyan University, and the O'Neill Playwriting Program at New Haven's Cooperative Arts High School. She holds a B.F.A. in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama.
Sarah completed her play The Good Guys while in residence at MacDowell in 2018 – a piece about Civil War reenactors, queer romance, and the lengths we go to to think of ourselves as the good guys. She also began the next play about commercial abundance and personal scarcity, lesbian separatism, and the weight of capitalism on our most intimate choices. About whether we can run from convention even when we want to.
During her 2022 residency, Sarah worked on In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot, a play about falling in love in an Amazon warehouse parking lot as the world ends, which would win the 2023 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and wrote a pilot adapted from the play.
