Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was born in Washington, DC in 1984. He graduated from Princeton University in 2006, with a major in anthropology, and earned a master's degree in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2007. He went on to graduate from the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrights Program at The Juilliard School. He has taught playwriting at the Tisch School and at Princeton, and currently teaches in the Hunter College Playwriting MFA Program.
His first play, Neighbors (2010) premiered off-Broadway at the Public Theatre. He has since written War (2014), Appropriate (2014), An Octoroon (2014), Gloria (2015), Everybody (2017), and Girls (2019). He won the 2014 Obie Award for Best New American Play, for Appropriate and An Octoroon. Gloria was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is currently a Residency Five playwright at Signature Theatre and recent honors include the MacArthur Fellowship, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama, the Benjamin Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Theatre Award, the Steinberg Playwriting Award, and the Tennessee Williams Award.
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