Harold Clurman Playwrights Division

Like its namesake this program was created to provide support to emerging playwrights. The Harold Clurman Lab Theater produces one play in its season by the playwright in residence. The author may also see other shows produced as curricular show or student production. Peter Nickowitz is the Head of the Playwrights Division.

Read Statement from
the Director of Harold Clurman Playwrights Division

Zayd Dorn is the 2009-2010 playwright in residence.
Zayd Dohrn is a playwright and screenwriter living in New York City. His plays, including Sick, Magic Forest Farm, Reborning, and Outside People, have been seen at Manhattan Theatre Club, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, MCC, Marin Theatre Company, The Public (SPF), Naked Angels, South Coast Rep, Southern Rep, Kitchen Dog Theater, and New York Theatre Workshop, among others. He earned his MFA from NYU and was a Lila Acheson Wallace Fellow at Juilliard. He received Lincoln Center's Lecomte du Nouy Prize, Theatre Masters' Visionary Playwrights Award, the Kennedy Center's Jean Kennedy Smith Award, and the Sky Cooper Prize, as well as residencies and/or commissions from Ars Nova, Alchemy Theatre, Dallas Theatre Center, The Stella Adler Studio, and the Royal Court Theatre of London. He is currently writing screenplays for American Film Company and Vox3 Films and is a member of the WGAe and the Dramatists Guild.

Peter Nickowitz' bio
Peter was the 2008-2009 Harold Clurman Playwright-in-residence at the Stella Adler Studio and head of the Harold Clurman Playwrights Division. He is a playwright, screenwriter, and poet. The Alice Complex had its world premiere in the Cherry Lane Theatre in August 2008 as part of the 12th Annual New York International Fringe Festival, starring Obie Award winner Lisa Banes and Tony nominee Xanthe Elbrick. The Alice Complex received a workshop production at the 2005 Dixon Place HOT! Festival in New York City and was produced at the Blank Theatre in Los Angeles in January 2006 along with his new play, Backgammon at the Louvre. This production starred Tony Award-winner Harriet Harris and Kate Mara.

Peter's poems have appeared in a number of literary magazines including The Paris Review, Barrow Street, Third Coast, Shampoo, and Slope. He has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, Barrow Street Book Award, and Levis prizes. He is the author of Rhetoric and Sexuality: The Poetry of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill (Palgrave Macmillan 2006). Lulu, the screenplay Peter co-wrote with Bill Oliver based on the life of silent film star Louise Brooks, was selected for the FIND/LA Screenwriters Lab and optioned by Neve Campbell's First Snow Productions. Peter and Bill's latest screenplay, The Obit Writer, is a contemporary noir thriller that has been optioned by producer Susan A. Stover and HeadQuarters.

Peter is a graduate of Brandeis University and New York University. He has taught American Literature and creative writing at The University of Southern California, The City University of New York, and New York University.