Rachel G. Sheinkin
Adjunct Assistant Professor
A Tony Award winning librettist for musical theater, Rachel is often drawn to hybrid forms and collaborations. Her work has appeared on and off Broadway, regionally and internationally, including most prominently in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, with a score by William Finn, for which she received Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Book of a Musical.
Other productions include Striking 12, a hybrid rock concert/musical written with and for the band GrooveLiily (Lucille Lortel nomination for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical); Sleeping Beauty Wakes, originally performed in both ASL and English in collaboration with Deaf West Theatre (LA Ovation Award for World Premiere Musical); book and lyrics for Blood Drive with music by fellow GMTWP faculty member Joel Derfner (Bridewell Theater, London) and for Serenade with music by Nils Olaf Dolven (Jaradoa, NYC).
Rachel’s writing has been supported with residencies, grants, and fellowships from, among others: MacDowell, Manhattan Theatre Club, The National Alliance for Musical Theatre, The Eugene O’Neill National Music Theater Conference, Playwrights Horizons, and The Baryshnikov Arts Foundation; and with productions at new-work-developing venues including Second Stage Theater; Barrington Stage Co; The Old Globe; TheatreWorks, Palo Alto; Center Theatre Group, LA; The Guthrie Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, and McCarter Theatre Center.
A member of Dramatists Guild, Rachel also enjoys working as a dramaturg and serving as mentor for earlier career playwrights, which she has done most recently for Clubbed Thumb’s early-career writing group, and Toronto’s Musical Stage Company and their upcoming Kelly v. Kelly.
She is a graduate of GMTWP’s Cycle 10 , and previously received a BA from Brown University and an MFA in playwriting from Yale School of Drama, where she has also taught classes in libretto writing for musical theater.
As a teacher, she loves encouraging new generations of artists to explore both craft and voice, stretching their own boundaries and that of the form.