Winter miller

Winter is an award-winning playwright who makes and champions art to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Eartha Kitt once held her left hand for five minutes. She is a founding member of the Obie-winning 13Playwrights. She is playwright and librettist for the opera drama No One Is Forgotten with composers Paola Prestini and Sxip Shirey, which will premiere in NYC in Winter 2027. The opera is adapted from her play No One Is Forgotten, which Winter produced and directed, which The New Yorker described as “a profoundly devastating play.” Their award-winning play In Darfur premiered in a sold-out run at The Public, followed by an SRO performance at Central Park’s 1800-seat Delacorte, a first for a play by a woman. Winter traveled to the Sudan border with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. In Darfur has played theaters nationwide and the UK.

Select plays include When Monica Met Hillary, The Penetration Play, Conspicuous, Animalia Arthropoda, The Arrival, and the short play Colored, part of the New Black Fest anthology Facing Our Truth: 10-Minute Plays on Trayvon, Race and Privilege. Their plays are published by Concord.

Winter is a two-time NYFA awardee (2022, 2016), and with fellowships at Sundance, Djerassi (MacElwee Fellow), Princeton, Bogliasco Foundation, Cherry Lane Mentor Project, Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center, Space at Ryder Farm, The Playwrights Center, Civilians R&D, NNPN, New Georges, SLAC, and a Nancy Dean Lesbian Playwriting Prize.

They have created theater with young people surviving in war-torn areas of Northern Uganda and Palestine, and in LGBTQIA communities in NYC. She received a BA from Smith College, an MFA from Columbia University, is a proud affiliate of New Georges and The Playwrights Center, and was elected NYC’s first Dramatists Guild Representative.

Winter’s children’s book Not A Cat, illustrated by Danica Novgorodoff, is a Lambda pick and Winner of the 2023 Children’s Book Council Award, published by Tilbury House/Penguin/Random. Gloria Steinem and Samantha Bee think you should read this book.

A former journalist, Winter wrote 90+ articles for The New York Times, and is profiled in The New Yorker, Bomb, New York Magazine, and on NPR’s Brian Lehrer and All of It with Alison Stewart. They are featured in the anthologies V Ensler’s A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer (Random), Pretty Bitches and Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists (Seal). 

Winter has professed at Fordham University, Boston University, SUNY Purchase, and in MFA programs with The New School and Queens University of Charlotte. She has lectured at BU (MFA), Princeton, NYU, and Pace, and led workshops with The Playwrights Center, The New Group, Primary Stages, New York Theater Workshop Mind the Gap, and worked with NYC teens with Arts Connection. She leads ongoing workshops for adult playwrights beginning through advanced, 18-80s. Writers she’s worked with have gone on to produce plays in their living room, and others have won the Princess Grace, Susan Smith Blackburn, and the Pulitzer. She has guided many actors who also become playwrights.