Maddie Dennis-Yates is a playwright (MFA Hunter College, 2025) whose plays have been developed with or commissioned by Fresh Ground Pepper, Workshop Theater, Art House Productions, Stroller Scene, Stagefemmes at Kenyon College, the Emerging Professional Residents at Milwaukee Repertory Theater, and others. Recent recognition: third place winner, Echo Play Contest, finalist, Playwrights Horizons Unplugged production, finalist, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference (2025 & 2026), finalist, MOXIE Theatre Lamoise New Works Festival, semifinalist, Playwrights Foundation's Bay Area Playwrights Festival, semifinalist, Rattlestick’s Terrance McNally Incubator, finalist, Breaking & Entering reading series, finalist, EST/Youngblood cohort.
She writes dark and effervescent...
Maddie Dennis-Yates is a playwright (MFA Hunter College, 2025) whose plays have been developed with or commissioned by Fresh Ground Pepper, Workshop Theater, Art House Productions, Stroller Scene, Stagefemmes at Kenyon College, the Emerging Professional Residents at Milwaukee Repertory Theater, and others. Recent recognition: third place winner, Echo Play Contest, finalist, Playwrights Horizons Unplugged production, finalist, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference (2025 & 2026), finalist, MOXIE Theatre Lamoise New Works Festival, semifinalist, Playwrights Foundation's Bay Area Playwrights Festival, semifinalist, Rattlestick’s Terrance McNally Incubator, finalist, Breaking & Entering reading series, finalist, EST/Youngblood cohort.
She writes dark and effervescent comedies about the ways our neuroses shape our worlds and attempts at love under late-stage capitalism, and her subjects are often delusional women, because they allow her to trouble simplistic ideas about victimhood and to see the world anew.
Her work has also been produced, read, and/or awarded by the Austin Film Festival (Playwriting Competition), New Short Play Festival, Source Festival, D.C. Shorts Film Festival, Women's Weekend Film Challenge, and others. She’s worked with young theatermakers as an Adjunct Instructor of Playwriting at Hunter College, a mentor for Columbia University’s NOMADS New Play Festival, a reader and dramaturg for the O’Neill’s Young Playwrights Festival, and a career coach for Dramatic Writing students at NYU.
Maddie studied playwriting at the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and she returned to the O’Neill as a script assistant for its summer conferences. She’s studied comedy writing at Upright Citizens Brigade and Second City, and she attended George Washington University in D.C., where she was an art history major. She was, for a time, a professional horse girl.