Barbara Garson is a playwright, author, and activist who has long been inspired to affect political change wherever she sees injustice, and much of her activism has manifested itself in the form of books and plays she has written. Though she is most well-known for MACBIRD! (1967), she wrote many other plays, including MARIO AND THE MAGICIAN (1965), GOING CO-OP (1972), THE DINOSAUR DOOR (1976), THE DEPARTMENT (1983), and SECURITY (2015). Three of her plays were performed at Theater for the New City, and MACBIRD! was performed at The Village Gate and sold over half a million copies as a book.

Barbara Garson was born and raised in Brooklyn. She spent her summers working in New York City, yet was exposed to very few shows before leaving for college. She married at seventeen and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a degree in Classical History. She organized street theater for the first sit-in on a college campus in 1964 while editor of the Free Speech Movement, during which she and 800 other students were arrested. Her first theatrical venture was in the form of a puppet show called MARIO AND THE MAGICIAN that was inspired by a speech delivered by Mario Savio, another key member of the Free Speech Movement. Because she created many theater pieces for political events and demonstrations, she considers herself as much an activist as a playwright. In addition to plays, she has written numerous articles for various political journals and is the author of four books: All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work (1975), The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past (1988), Money Makes the World Go Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global Economy (2001), Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live in the Great Recession (2013). In addition to winning an Obie Award for THE DINOSAUR DOOR (1976), she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Mac Arthur Foundation Grant, and more. She even ran for Vice President in the 1992 Presidential election with running mate J. Quinn Brisben as part of the Socialist Party.