Our Story: Founded in 1976, Playwrights Foundation is today widely recognized as one of the top organizations in the U.S. dedicated to the creative development and career acceleration of contemporary playwrights. Over 80% of the plays we develop have gone on to successful productions, winning awards and accolades.

Our Purpose: Playwrights Foundation supports and empowers playwrights’ artistic growth and careers while championing their voices on a national level.

Our Vision: We imagine a future where playwrights are radically centered as visionary leaders who transform the world through storytelling.

Our Values:

Playwright Centered: We center our decisions around the specific needs of the playwrights we serve and empower them to have artistic agency.

Community: We strive to create a meaningful community amongst playwrights and cultivate a constellation of creative relationships between playwrights and artists, organizations, advocates and audiences.

Equity: We seek to build flexible and adaptable systems in order to create equitable opportunities for people across differences to participate, contribute and succeed.

Inclusion: We create a culture of access, well-being and a sense of belonging across a diversity of intersectional identities and voices.

Innovation: We value artistic experimentation, risk-taking, and innovative systems that support playwrights through a mindset of creativity and abundance.

Transparency: We strive to practice clear, open, and honest communication at every level both internally and externally.

Local Commitment: We invest in relationships with Bay Area playwrights, artists, organizations and communities

Organization Overview
Founded in 1976 by Robert Woodruff to provide a forum for vanguard playwrights to experiment with new ideas, to develop and nurture creative collaborative relationships, and push the boundaries of the form, PF has since served nearly 500 emergent playwrights in successive waves, providing them with the indispensable, illusive resources and support required to advance new plays early in their development toward production. Our program alumni, first discovered early in their careers, have given voice to the social issues of the day, uplifted our cultural heritage, experimented in new forms, and promoted connectedness between people, and now include some of the most prominent names in contemporary theater, including Sam Shepard, David Henry Hwang, Nilo Cruz, Anna Deavere Smith, Philip Kan Gotanda, Paula Vogel, and Naomi Iizuka, to name just a few.

In the past fifteen years, over 80% of the artists we have worked with received subsequent productions, and their experience with the BAPF, has proven to be a significant step in that process. Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop; Lauren Yee’s Samsara; Kimber Lee’s brownsville song: b-side for tray, Chris Chen’s The Hundred Flowers Project, Peter Nachtrib’s Bob, along with Aaron Loeb, Lauren Gunderson, Marisela Orta, and Yussef el Guindi exemplify a few of the many recent beneficiaries of our work. Since 2012, program alumni have won three consecutive Will Glickman new play awards, Sam Hunter (BAPF 2007) won the MacArthur Genius Award, and Annie Baker (also BAPF 2007) won the Pulitzer. Both of these artists had their very first professional experiences at PF. In 2011, two PF workshopped plays had Broadway runs: Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop.

The centerpiece of our programming is the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BAPF); as one of the first and longest-running new play festivals in the U.S., the BAPF is a hothouse for new work, which has supported over 300 diverse, fiercely talented writers. PF’s other programs are: the Producing Partners Initiative /Commissioning Program, the New Play Institute; the Rough Readings Series; the Resident Playwrights Program; the SF One-Minute Play Festival; and Des Voix…Found in Translation. Through these innovative programs, PF is continuing to fulfill our role as an essential resource for writers to develop new work, learn new skills, forge connections with producers, and engage audiences with their work.

Current Staff: Executive Artistic Director Jessica Bird Beza, Literary Manager Heather Helinsky, Artistic Producer AeJay Mitchell