Kenneth Prestininzi is a director/playwright/dramaturg/educator and past Associate Chair of Playwriting at the Yale School of Drama. His work as a director, playwright and/or dramaturg of new plays has been at ArtsEmerson (New Wave Festival), Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep (as artistic director of the new play summer festival), Dixon Place, Huntington Theater, Intramural Theater-New Orleans, Great Plains Theater Conference, Kansas City Rep, New Dramatists, New York Theater Workshop, Perishable Theater, Playground-San Francisco, Repertorio Español, Shattered Globe Theater, Sleeping Weazel, Southern Rep, Sundance Institute, Trap Door Theater, Yale School of Drama (Associate Chair with Paula Vogel and Interim Chair of Playwriting), Z Space, and elsewhere. He has collaborated, developed or produced new work with Eugenie Chan, Mia Chung, Mashuq Mushtaq Deen, Barbara Hammond, Alphonso Horne, Jennifer Haley, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Martyna Majok, Deborah Margolin, Mary Zimmerman and others. His play BEHOLDER won Chicago’s Joseph Jefferson Award for best new play. His plays have been performed in Boston, Brighton, Chicago, Edinburgh, Kalamazoo, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New Jersey, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Prague, Providence, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere. Professor Prestininzi teaches clowning, playwriting and solo performance at Connecticut College. MATKA was a 2024 finalist at the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Last year, he directed his new play OPHELIA RUN AMOK, because he wanted to see a version of HAMLET where Ophelia didn’t have to drown yet again – so he wrote it. His two-person musical THE MISS ROSE SHOW will be workshopped in the summer of 2025 in San Francisco at Playground. Ken is a New Dramatist alum playwright who studied with María Irene Fornés in San Francisco and Mexico where he also hosted her playwriting workshops.
New Dramatists
Original play production history available upon request