Dan O’Brien is a playwright and a poet. His play The Body of an American won the 2013 PEN Center USA Award for Drama, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, and the 2011 L. Arnold Weissberger Award for Playwriting. The Body of an American premiered at Portland Center Stage in 2012 and will receive its UK premiere in a coproduction at the Gate Theatre in London and the Royal & Derngate Theatre in Northampton in 2014. He was the librettist for Visitations, an opera composed by Jonathan Berger, directed by Rinde Eckert, and commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Visitations premiered at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University in 2013 and will receive its New York City premiere at the Prototype Festival in 2014. O’Brien’s debut poetry collection, War Reporter (Hanging Loose Press, 2013; CB Editions, 2013), was shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious Forward Prize for Best First Collection. O’Brien is the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the inaugural Carl Djerassi Fellowship in Playwriting at University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, and two Tennessee Williams Fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as residencies from Yaddo and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center.  

Photo by David Bornfriend