Brittany K. Allen is a Brooklyn-based writer and actor. She’s a proud member of Ensemble Studio’s Theatre’s Obie-winning Youngblood collective, an alumna of the Emerging Writers Group at The Public Theater, and was a 2017 Van Lier New Voices fellow at the Lark. Her play Redwood (2017 & 2020 Kilroys List) received its world premiere at Portland Center Stage in 2019, and will appear in upcoming seasons at the Jungle Theater and Ensemble Studio Theatre. She's developed work for/with Manhattan Theatre Club, Ars Nova, Woolly Mammoth, and Kansas City Repertory Theatre, and currently holds commissions from Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Studio Theatre, and Portland Center Stage. She was the recipient of the 2021 Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, and her writing has been supported by SPACE on Ryder Farm, and scholarships to Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers Conference, respectively. Her prose appears or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, and Longreads, among other places.
While in residency at MacDowell, she revised and restructured the opening pages of her (first) novel, and drafted roughly 20 new pages of material for that same work. She also wrote the first scenes of a new play, which is shaping up to be an homage to her east Texas family and an interrogation of what land ownership means for Black Southerners. The latter project is currently under commission from Portland Center Stage at the Armory. Shortly before arriving in Peterborough, Allen received the Dramatists Guild Foundation's Georgia Engel Comedic Playwriting Prize, and was named the inaugural Fresh Voices prose fellow for Epiphany Magazine.
Portrait by Joe Huffman
