about

Ariel Stess is an Obie Award–winning playwright, director, and screenwriter originally from Santa Fe, NM. Her play KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA won the 2024 Obie Award for Playwriting and the 2025 Yale Drama Series Prize. Hailed by The New Yorker as a “superb lo-fi slow burn” and described by Pulitzer Prize winner Branden Jacobs-Jenkins as “dramatic portraiture of the highest order,” the play will be published by Yale University Press in 2026.

Other works include Heartbreak (The Bushwick Starr/New Georges, Time Out NY Critics’ Pick); I’m Pretty Fucked Up (Clubbed Thumb, five stars Time Out NY); The World My Mama Raised (Clubbed Thumb); and He Ate Quietly Into the Wall (The New Ohio). Her plays have been developed or produced at Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, The Bushwick Starr, New Georges, Mabou Mines, Brave New World Rep, Rivendell Theatre, and The Lark.

Stess is the recipient of Creative Capital’s inaugural 2026 State of the Art Prize and serves on the Board of Directors of New Dramatists. She is an Affiliated Artist with New Georges, a resident playwright at New Dramatists, an Affiliated Writer and former Core Writer at The Playwrights’ Center, and has held residencies at Yaddo, SPACE on Ryder Farm (with Playwrights Horizons), and Mabou Mines. She has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons and Clubbed Thumb. She holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College. She currently teaches in Northwestern University’s Radio/TV/Film department and in the MFA in Writing for the Screen & Stage.

Representation | Theatre
Bonnie Davis at Bret Adams, LTD
bdavis@bretadamsltd.net

Management | TV & Film
Jacob Perlin at Iconoclast
jacob@iconoclast.tv

photo & site design by Winston Mason Riley