Callie Kimball

Callie Kimball is an award-winning, New England-based playwright.

Her two-hander Things That Are Round was a finalist for the Woodward/Newman Drama Award, and will enjoy its West Coast premiere at CapStage in 2027. Her new play, Show Me Any Heaven (a sequel to Dreams of the Penny Gods) will have a workshop at Portland Stage in 2026. She’s also working on a solo show.

Her play Sofonisba, about the remarkable life of Renaissance portraitist Sofonisba Anguissola, was on the 2016 Kilroys’ List after receiving Honorable Mentions in 2014 and 2015. The play won the Clauder Gold Prize, and was a finalist for the Princess Grace Award and Shakespeare’s Sister Award.

Her play Alligator Road, set in a yarn-bombed hardware store, won a Broadway World Critic’s Choice Award before enjoying a pandemic reading at MCC Theater, directed by Thomas Sadoski and starring Julianna Margulies. She won the Rita and Burton Goldberg prize twice, once for her play Rush, and again for her play Dreams of the Penny Gods.

Her plays have finaled or semifinaled for the O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, Clubbed Thumb Biennial Award, the Leah Ryan Boost Award, NY Innovative Theater Award, Seacoast Spotlight Award, and a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship.

She has received commissions from Portland Stage, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Washington Shakespeare Company, Phoenix Theatre DC, Shadowcatcher Productions, and The In Series, for whom she created a new translation of Mozart’s The Impresario that was later produced in Trinidad and Tobago.

Her plays have been produced at Portland Stage, Rep Stage, The Brick, Team Awesome Robot, Greater Boston Stage Company, Washington Shakespeare Company, Washington Stage Guild, Project Y Theatre, Mad Horse Theatre, Theatre L’Acadie, Halcyon Theatre, Dramatic Rep, Theatre at Monmouth, The Players’ Ring, Boston University, Bowdoin College, Hunter College, FRIGID Festival, DC Fringe, Hollywood Fringe, PortFringe, and Drama League’s DirectorFest, among others.

Further, her plays have been read or developed at Kitchen Dog Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, the Kennedy Center, Echo Theatre, The Road Theatre Company (with Jim Beaver and Lee Meriwether), National Museum of Women in the Arts, Ashland New Plays Festival, Lost Girls Theatre, Lunar Energy Productions, Electric Pear Productions, and Little Festival of the Unexpected at Portland Stage, among others.

For about ten years (until it closed in 2021), the Lark Play Development Center was her artistic home. She workshopped over half a dozen plays there, was in Playwrights’ Week (Dreams of the Penny Gods), and was a a playwright at several retreats, including the Winter Writers’ Retreat, the Vassar Retreat, and Meeting of the Minds.

Scholarly articles about her plays have been published in Comedia Performance: A Journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater (Sofonisba) and in Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation (Lucrece and the Two Janes).

Interviews with Callie appear in American Theatre Magazine as well as in a book on teaching due from Bloomsbury Publishing in March 2027. She has written short nonfiction for NPR and The Dramatist, and her work has been anthologized by Tripwire Harlot, The Kilroys, and Theatre Communications Group. She has also been interviewed on several podcasts, including The Subtext, Moment to Moment, The Family Room, and Play4Keeps.

She teaches Playwriting and Literature at Middlebury College. She has also taught or guest lectured at King’s College London Shakespeare Centre, the ACS International School in London, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Bates College, Colby College, Bowdoin College, National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, Maryland Shakespeare Festival, Maine College of Art, Maine Playwrights Festival, and elsewhere. Many of her students enjoy success in the fields of film, television, and playwriting.

She started out as an educator, classical actor, and movement instructor before turning to playwriting. She studied at the Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive, and was the movement coach for the world premiere of Ariel Dorfman’s Picasso’s Closet.

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.  

She earned her MFA in Playwriting at Hunter College under the direction of Tina Howe. While in grad school, she worked as a project and production manager at NBCUniversal in New York for several years, and furthered her business education at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education. She is a former MacDowell Fellow, an Affiliate Writer at The Playwrights’ Center, and former Resident Playwright at Theater at Monmouth.

She is a proud member of SAG-AFTRA and The Dramatists Guild.

Callie’s interview on American Theatre’s Subtext podcast.

Callie on the New Play Exchange

Callie on the Playwrights' Center