Who Are the Playwrights

Jaclyn Backhaus

Resident Playwright

2021 — 2029

Jaclyn Backhaus is a playwright, educator, arts facilitator, and mother. Her plays include Wives (Playwrights Horizons), India Pale Ale (2018 Horton Foote Prize, Manhattan Theatre Club), and Men On Boats (Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Horizons). She is one of five Creative Directors of of the process-based arts facilitation group Fresh Ground Pepper, and she is one of the fourteen members of the current cohort of The Kilroys, a bicoastal collective that celebrates women, trans, and nonbinary presence in the American theater landscape. She is a Lincoln Center Playwright-in-Residence, and she was once a 2016 Tow Playwright Resident with Clubbed Thumb. She got a BFA from NYU, where she now teaches some skillsets of playwriting to brilliant students. She resides in Ridgewood, Queens, with her husband Andrew J. Scoville, a theater director, and their son Ernie. Currently, she is writing nothing and reading everything. Send her book recs at jaclynbackhaus.com 

headshot credit: photo by Marcus Middleton