Ken Urban

Ken Urban is a playwright, screenwriter, director and musician whose plays have been produced across the country and in the UK.  He recently became a senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, leading the playwriting program at the school.  Urban was born in New Jersey in 1974.  He currently splits his time between New York City and Boston.

In the 2017-18 Season, two of Urban’s plays will have world premieres:  "A Guide for the Homesick" opens at the Huntington Theater Company in Boston (directed by Colman Domingo) in October 2017; and "The Remains" will receive its world premiere at Studio Theatre in Washington, DC (directed by Artistic Director David Muse) in May 2018. 

Plays

Ken Urban's plays include Sense of an Ending, The Correspondent, A Future Perfect, The Awake, and The Happy Sad.  His most recent, Nibbler, was produced off-Broadway earlier this year by The Amoralists.

Urban’s work has also been produced by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 59E59 Theatres, The Summer Play Festival at The Public Theater, and Studio 42 (all New York), Theatre503 in London, First Floor Theater in Chicago, and SpeakEasy Stage Company in Boston.   Urban’s works have been developed at Playwrights Horizons, and The Civilians’ R&D Group (both New York), Donmar Warehouse (London), Huntington Theatre Company (Boston), Williamstown Theatre Festival (Williamstown, Mass.), and the Theatre @ Boston Court (Pasadena, Calif.). 

He is a Resident Playwright at New Dramatists and an Affiliated Writer at the Playwrights’ Center. He was the Founding Artistic Director of The Committee, a  New York-based  theatre  company that produced “catastrophic theatre" including the first workshop production of  Sarah Kane's  Cleansed.

His upcoming theater projects include  The Immortals, a drama about academia and the cellular afterlife of Henrietta Lack,  Inappropriate Sexual Relations, an adaptation of an anonymous erotic novel found in a book store in Ithaca, NY, and  The Absence of Weather, a history play about the first Secretary of Defense and the start of the Cold War. 

TV and Film

Urban’s TV pilot The Art of Listening recently was optioned by ITV Studio. He wrote the screenplay for feature-film adaptation of his play The Happy Sad, which screened internationally at over 25 film festivals, and is now available on iTunes, Hulu and Amazon. 

Awards/Recognition

In 2009, Urban won the 2008 L. Arnold Weisberger Award, given each year by the Williamstown Theatre Festival, for his play Sense of an Ending. His other awards and recognitions have come from New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Huntington Theater Playwriting Fellowship, MacDowell Colony Fellowships, Headlands Artist Residency, Djerassi Artist Residency, Dramatist Guild Fellowship, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship. 

Publishing and Writing

Ken Urban’s plays are published by Dramatists Play Service in the United States and Methuen in the United Kingdom and Europe, and they have been featured in numerous monologue anthologies.

His essays on theater have appeared in Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights, Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights, Contemporary Theatre Review, Modern Drama, A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama, Cool Britannia: British Political Drama in the 1990s, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.

Education and Teaching

Urban is a graduate of  Bucknell University (B.A.) and Rutgers University, where he holds a Ph.D. in English literature, Urban has taught playwriting, screenwriting, academic writing and dramatic literature at those institutions, as well as Harvard, Princeton, Tufts University, and Davidson College.  

He became a senior lecturer at MIT in fall 2017, where he leads the playwriting program at the school.  

In 2016 he was McGee Visiting Professor of Playwriting at Davidson College in Davidson, N.C. 

Music

Urban plays in the band Occurrence, which features vocalists Cat Hollyer and Johnny Hager. The band is currently recording its sixth album, expected in Spring 2018. Their 2016 release  The Past Will Last Forever  received strong reviews, with critics calling it “a formidable electro-space-post-punk beast” (Atwood Magazine) and “what it might sound like if John Foxx were to become interested in post-dubstep beats and riddims” (Forestpunk). It is available on iTunes, and on limited edition vinyl (available on Bandcamp). 

External links

• Urban maintains a website with information on his theatre and music.
• Article on Ken Urban from Bucknell University alumni magazine
• Article on Ken Urban from Brooklyn Rail, September 2006
• Ken Urban on Doollee.com