Photo by Hannah Daly Photography.
Callie Kimball is an award-winning, nationally commissioned and internationally produced playwright, with a dedicated track record of amplifying historically minoritized voices. She earned her MFA under Tina Howe at Hunter College, where she won the Rita & Burton Goldberg Playwriting Award two years in a row. She’s also a former MacDowell Fellow.
Her plays have been produced and developed in New York, Chicago, LA, and DC, at the Kennedy Center, MCC Theater, Lark Play Development Center, Rep Stage, Greater Boston Stage Company, Portland Stage, Washington Shakespeare Company, Theater at Monmouth, Kitchen Dog, Mad Horse, Echo Theatre, The Brick, Project Y, Team Awesome Robot, Theatre L’Acadie, Halcyon Theatre, The Drama League, and many colleges and festivals across the country.
Her work has been anthologized by Tripwire Harlot, The Kilroys, and Theatre Communications Group. Academic articles about her plays have appeared in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, and in Comedia Performance: A Journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater.
She's an Affiliate Artist at Portland Stage Company and an Affiliate Writer at the Playwrights' Center. She has been Playwright-in-Residence at Theater at Monmouth and the Maine Playwrights Festival. Her play Sofonisba won the Clauder Gold Prize, was a finalist for the O'Neill, a semifinalist for the Princess Grace Award, and was included on The Kilroys' List.
Her plays are regularly studied by undergraduate and graduate students from the US to the UK, and she has been a guest artist at Kings College London Shakespeare Centre, the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, Bates College, Bowdoin College, Colby College, Maine College of Art, Southern Maine Community College, and the ACS International Schools in London.
Her first teaching job was bringing Shakespeare to a juvenile detention facility, and she has taught playwriting to over 1,000 students through various nonprofit arts organizations and colleges. She currently teaches playwriting as well as a first-year writing seminar called The Literary Remix at Bates.
Her themes range from historical dramas and classical adaptations to socio-political comedies and futuristic dystopias. Many of her plays explore emotional violence and parasitic relationships, with characters who live at the intersection of language and power, and struggle to break free from the constraints of class, race, gender, and systemic abuse.
Some have described her plays as feminist, which is lovely, but really she just writes plays where the main characters have jobs and goals and happen to be women.