Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright drawing from a range of contemporary and historical theatrical genres to engage frankly with complicated issues around identity, family, class, and race. He received a B.A. (2006) from Princeton University and an M.A. (2007) from New York University, and he is a graduate (2014) of the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at The Juilliard School.

His plays have been performed at such venues as the Signature Theater, The Public Theatre, Lincoln Center, Soho Rep., Yale Repertory Theatre, Actors Theater of Louisville, National Theatre in London, Theater Bielefeld and Residenztheater, Munich.

Many of Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays use a historical lens to satirize and comment on modern culture, particularly the ways in which race and class are negotiated in both private and public settings. “Neighbors” (2010) includes performances reminiscent of historical minstrel acts performed by actors in blackface. These interludes lay bare the fraught expectations faced by black artists. “Appropriate” (2012) has all of the trappings of an ‘American family drama,’ but the familiar plot of a family brought together after a father’s death is disrupted by the discovery of a collection of lynching photographs among the deceased’s belongings. In the characters’ varied responses, past and present racial relations become a palpable presence on stage, despite an entirely white cast. In “An Octoroon” (2014), an adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s nineteenth-century play of a similar name, anachronistic acting styles, self-conscious references to the intrinsic artifice of theater, and jolting juxtapositions of the past and present demonstrate the enduring legacies of slavery and the ways in which people can live in close proximity and yet worlds apart. With “Gloria” (2015), Jacobs-Jenkins returns to the naturalistic play, using the biting satire of the comic drama to explore the stratified, competitive world of the modern workplace and its sometimes fatal consequences.

For his plays “Appropriate” and “An Octoroon” he won the 2014 Obie Award for Best New American Play. His plays “Gloria” and “Everybody” were finalists for the 2016 and 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama respectively. His recent honours include the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award, the Benjamin H. Danks Award, the Steinberg Playwriting Award, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award and he was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2016. Jacobs-Jenkins is currently a Residency 5 playwright at Signature Theatre and Master-Artist-in-Residence in the Playwriting MFA programme of Hunter College. Together with Annie Baker, he also is a co-director of the Playwriting MFA programme at Hunter College, The City University of New York.

As of May 2019.