Sheri Wilner

Sheri Wilner is an award-winning playwright who has been working in the theatre for over twenty-five years. She co-wrote the libretto for Cake Off, a full-length musical adaptation of her celebrated ten-minute play Bake Off. Cake Off premiered in October 2015 at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, and received a 2016 Helen Hayes Award nomination for Outstanding Original Play or Musical Adaptation. Cake Off also received a developmental workshop at the Old Globe in San Diego (Jan. 2016) and was produced in 2016 at the Bucks County Playhouse.

Her plays include Kingdom City, Father Joy, Relative Strangers, Labor Day, Joan of Arkansas, The End, A Tall Order, Equilibrium, Little Death of a Salesman and Hunger, and have been performed and developed at such major theatres as the La Jolla Playhouse, Guthrie Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Williamstown Theatre Festival, the O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, City Theatre (Miami), Naked Angels, Primary Stages, New Georges, Contemporary American Theatre Festival and the Old Vic/New Voices in London.

She has twice been a co-winner of the prestigious Heideman Award granted by the Actors Theatre of Louisville: in 1998 for Labor Day, which premiered at the 1999 Humana Festival, and in 2001 for Bake Off, which premiered at the 2002 Humana Festival.

Her work has been published in over a dozen anthologies, and Playscripts.com has published twelve of her one-acts, which have received over four hundred productions across the United States as well as in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Japan, United Kingdom and India.

Her playwriting awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting, a Bush Artist Fellowship and two Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowships.

Also an established playwriting teacher, Sheri is currently on the faculty of the Dramatists Guild Institute and the Master Playwright for the Miami Dade Department of Cultural 2017-19 Playwrights Development Program. Previously she was the Monan Professor of Theatre Arts at Boston College, the Fred Coe Visiting Playwright-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Playwriting at Florida State University’s MFA Dramatic Writing Program in Tallahassee. She has taught numerous classes at the Primary Stages Einhorn School of Performing Arts; and has conducted playwriting classes and workshops at Cornell University; University of Minnesota/Guthrie Theater BFA Actor Training Program; and New York University’s Drama Therapy Program.

She attended Cornell University and received her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.