Ariel Stess is an Obie Award–winning playwright, director, and screenwriter originally from Santa Fe, NM. Her play KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA – hailed by The New Yorker as “a superb lo-fi slow burn” with a “spectacularly precise structure” and called “dramatic portraiture of the highest order” by 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins – won the 2024 Obie Award for Playwriting and the 2025 Yale Drama Series Prize.
Other works include Heartbreak (The Bushwick Starr/New Georges, Time Out NY Critics’ Pick); I’m Pretty F*cked Up (Clubbed Thumb, five stars Time Out NY); The World My Mama Raised (Clubbed Thumb); and He Ate Quietly Into the Wall (The New Ohio). Her work has been developed or produced at Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, The Bushwick Starr, New Georges, Mabou Mines, Brave New World Rep, Rivendell Theatre, and The Lark.
Stess is currently developing two new stage pieces, a novel, and a screenplay, while KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA continues its national life, with a Yale Prize reading co-produced by Long Wharf Theatre (Oct 2025) and publication by Yale University Press in 2026.
Ariel is an Affiliated Artist with New Georges, a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a former Core Writer at The Playwrights’ Center, and has held residencies at Yaddo, SPACE on Ryder Farm (with Playwrights Horizons), and Mabou Mines. She’s been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons and Clubbed Thumb. She holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College. She currently teaches in Northwestern University’s Radio/TV/Film department and in the MFA in Writing for the Screen & Stage.