Leah Nanako Winkler (Playwright)

Leah Nanako Winkler is a Japanese American playwright from Kamakura, Japan and Lexington, Kentucky. Her plays include Kentucky (Kilroys List; World Premiere: Ensemble Studio Theatre in co-production with Page 73 and the Radio Drama Network; West Coast Premiere: East West Players), Two Mile Hollow (Kilroys List; Simultaneous World Premiere: Artists At Play in Los Angeles and Mixed Blood/Theater Mu in Minneapolis; First Floor Theater in Chicago; and Ferocious Lotus in San Francisco), Death For Sydney Black (terraNova Collective), Linus and Murray (EST/Marathon 2017), and more.

Leah’s plays have been developed at Playwrights Horizons/Clubbed Thumb, The Bushwick Starr, EST/Youngblood, Page 73, and more. She presented plays with her now defunct theater company Everywhere Theatre Group from 2007-2012 at places like the New Ohio Theatre, The Brick Theatre, Dixon Place, and the Ontological Hysteric Theater. Her publications include Samuel French, Dramatists Play Service, and American Theater Magazine.

Leah was a 2016-2018 Time Warner Fellow at the WP Theater, a member of the Dorothy Strelsin New American Playwrights Group at Primary Stages, Ma Yi, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and an alumnus of Youngblood. She was a 2017 Sundance fellow at Ucross and was recently awarded the first-ever Mark O’Donnell Prize from The Actors Fund and Playwrights Horizons. She is one of the inaugural recipients of Audible’s emerging playwright commissions and is the 2017-2019 Jerome New York Fellow at the Lark.