A.A. Brenner (he/they) is a playwright, dramaturg, and screenwriter based in New York and London. Brenner’s work blends naturalistic dialogue with heightened realism to explore queer, trans, Jewish, and Disabled experiences, challenging both societal power structures and theatrical form. Their plays have been presented or commissioned across the U.S. and U.K., including at La Jolla Playhouse, National Disability Theatre, Lincoln Center, Breaking the Binary Theatre, Brooklyn Rep U.K., Queens Theatre, Phamaly Theatre Company, Shakespeare Theatre Company (Fellows Consortium), CO_LAB Theatre Group, and more. Their play for all audiences, EMILY DRIVER’S GREAT RACE THROUGH TIME AND SPACE (co-written with Gregg Mozgala), was featured on the 2020 Kilroys List. Brenner’s honors include a Semi...
A.A. Brenner (he/they) is a playwright, dramaturg, and screenwriter based in New York and London. Brenner’s work blends naturalistic dialogue with heightened realism to explore queer, trans, Jewish, and Disabled experiences, challenging both societal power structures and theatrical form. Their plays have been presented or commissioned across the U.S. and U.K., including at La Jolla Playhouse, National Disability Theatre, Lincoln Center, Breaking the Binary Theatre, Brooklyn Rep U.K., Queens Theatre, Phamaly Theatre Company, Shakespeare Theatre Company (Fellows Consortium), CO_LAB Theatre Group, and more. Their play for all audiences, EMILY DRIVER’S GREAT RACE THROUGH TIME AND SPACE (co-written with Gregg Mozgala), was featured on the 2020 Kilroys List. Brenner’s honors include a Semi-Finalist slot at the 2023 O’Neill Playwrights Conference; Honorable Mention for the 2022 Leah Ryan Prize; and Finalist selections for the Apothetae & Lark Playwriting Fellowship, Platform Presents Playwright’s Prize, and Columbia@Roundabout New Play Reading Series. He has held residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, New York Stage and Film, Catwalk Arts Institute, and The Lark, among others. As a playwright, Brenner aims to cut new societal patterns by creating theater that reimagines the “classics” through a queer, Disabled lens, as well as new plays that reject those inherited structures entirely. Their plays are not “about” transness or Disability; they are inherently trans and Disabled in form and being. Through character-driven storytelling that leads with humor, complexity, and empathy, Brenner invites audiences into collective catharsis, where embracing every facet of oneself becomes the pathway to authentic community and cultural change. A 2022 MFA Playwriting graduate of Columbia University, where they studied under Lynn Nottage and David Henry Hwang, Brenner is currently developing two new works: GOOD GIRLS DON’T GO TO HELL, a genre-defying liminal drag dreamscape exploring archetypes of womanhood and queer becoming; and LOT’S WIFE, a queer historical drama that reimagines Vita Sackville-West (famously known as Virginia Woolf’s lover and the basis of her novel ORLANDO) and Violet Keppel’s romance across centuries, blending past and present in a meditation on love and memory.