CAITLIN SAYLOR STEPHENS is a Brooklyn-based playwright and librettist whose work explores the brutal reality of American womanhood.
Her play Five Models in Ruins, 1981 recently premiered Off-Broadway in a sold-out run at LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater, directed by Morgan Green and starring Elizabeth Marvel. Originally commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater, Five Models was developed at LCT3, where she has been a New Artist-in-Residence since 2019.
Other recent productions include Modern Swimwear (The Tank, 2023), which received a NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and TV Grant and was hailed as “gutting” (NYTimes), “artistically hazardous” (Helen Shaw, The New Yorker), and “like Cinderella in reverse” (BOMB Magazine); and When We Went Electronic (The Tank, 2018; European tour, 2021)...
CAITLIN SAYLOR STEPHENS is a Brooklyn-based playwright and librettist whose work explores the brutal reality of American womanhood.
Her play Five Models in Ruins, 1981 recently premiered Off-Broadway in a sold-out run at LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater, directed by Morgan Green and starring Elizabeth Marvel. Originally commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater, Five Models was developed at LCT3, where she has been a New Artist-in-Residence since 2019.
Other recent productions include Modern Swimwear (The Tank, 2023), which received a NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and TV Grant and was hailed as “gutting” (NYTimes), “artistically hazardous” (Helen Shaw, The New Yorker), and “like Cinderella in reverse” (BOMB Magazine); and When We Went Electronic (The Tank, 2018; European tour, 2021), described as “taut and brutal” (NYTimes). Both plays were directed by Meghan Finn.
Since 2008, Stephens has written over 25 full-length plays, developed and produced with support from institutions including New York Theatre Workshop, Ensemble Studio Theatre, New Georges, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Jerome Foundation, The Flea, Dutch Kills, and The Lark Play Development Center, where she developed more than ten new works through the Roundtable Program and the Playground Early-Career Playwrights Group including: Black Escalade, Two Men Missing in the Hudson River, Joley, Woke Boy, Company Happy Hour, The Unofficial Race Time of A. Pineda, and more.
Her work has been nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Bruntwood International Prize, and the Princess Grace Award in Theater, and recognized as a four-time finalist for the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill, a three-time finalist for New Dramatists, a two-time Honorable Mention on The Kilroys List, and as a finalist for numerous other honors.
Stephens has received new play commissions from Lincoln Center Theater, EST/The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and NYSCA.
She has been in residence at UCross, Headlands Center for the Arts, LCT3, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Sewanee Writers’ Conference as the 2016 Romulus Linney Fellow, and was a 2016 New Georges Audrey Resident. She is also an alum of New Georges' JAM.
Upcoming projects include Jason, an adaptation of Medea developed while in residence at Lincoln Center Theater, and Bunnies, a new play about Playboy Bunnies and the invention of the first standardized rape kit.
Stephens currently teaches in the MFA Visual Narrative program at the School of Visual Arts.
BA, Sarah Lawrence College. Representation: WME.
**Photo credit: Maria Baranova