Tina Howe is an award-winning playwright whose extensive career Off-Broadway spans four decades. Two of her plays were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama -- PAINTING CHURCHES in 1983 and PRIDE’S CROSSING in 1997, which also won the 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Notable highlights of her Off-Broadway career include: THE NEST (1970), MUSEUM (1978), THE ART OF DINING (1979), PAINTING CHURCHES (1982), APPROACHING ZANZIBAR(1989), COASTAL DISTURBANCES (1987), which was nominated for a Tony Award, ONE SHOE OFF (1993), BIRTH ANDAFTER BIRTH (2006), and CHASING MANET (2009). Howe also did new translations of Eugene Ionesco’s THE BALD SOPRANO and THE LESSON (2004). Her works have been seen at The Public Theater, Second Stage, Lincoln Center, The Atlantic, and Primary Stages, among other theaters.

Howe was born into a literary Bostonian family, but was raised in New York City. Her father, Quincy Howe, broadcast the evening news on CBS radio when she was a little girl. Her first play, Closing Time (about the end of the world) was done at Sarah Lawrence College her senior year. Among her many awards are an OBIE, a Rockefeller, a Guggenheim, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award, a William Inge Award, and, most recently, a Master American Dramatist Award from PEN. Howe has taught playwriting all across the country. She recently retired from Hunter College, where she taught for 25 years, as well as launching the Rita and Burton Goldberg MFA in Playwriting in 2010. She is proud to have served on the council of the Dramatists Guild of America for just as long.