Emily Schwend

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Emily Schwend is a New York–based playwright whose work explores feminism, geographical specificity, and, occasionally, the supernatural world. Most recently, her play Utility, about an overworked and underpaid woman’s struggle for stability, was produced off Broadway in New York and subsequently won the 2016 Yale Drama Series Prize.

Schwend is using her fellowship year to research and write a new play about the archetype of witches through a feminist lens. She will also complete a work-in-progress that examines the tension between a father and daughter and the limits of language in expressing certain truths.

Schwend’s plays have been produced off Broadway in New York and elsewhere. In addition to the Yale award, she is the recipient of the ACT New Play Award, the David Calicchio Emerging American Playwright Prize, the Heideman Award, the Lecomte du Nouy Prize, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Tow Foundation playwriting residency at Second Stage Theatre. Her work has been commissioned by Ensemble Studio Theatre through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and by the Old Vic, in London. She is an alumna of the playwriting programs at New York University and the Juilliard School.