Christopher Shinn is a playwright and screenwriter who lives in Brooklyn. Several of his plays have premiered at the Royal Court: Four, Other People, Where Do We Live (Obie Award), Dying City (Pulitzer Prize finalist), and Now or Later (shortlisted for the Evening Standard Theatre Award). Other plays include The Narcissist (Chichester Festival Theatre), Against (Almeida Theatre), Teddy Ferrara (Goodman Theatre and Donmar Warehouse), An Opening in Time (Hartford Stage), Picked (Vineyard Theatre), On the Mountain (South Coast Rep), What Didn't Happen (Playwrights Horizons), and The Coming World (Soho Theatre). His adaptation of Hedda Gabler premiered on Broadway in 2009 and his adaptation of Judgment Day premiered at Park Avenue Armory in 2019 and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005, a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard in 2019-20, a Cullman Fellow at New York Public Library in 2020-21, a MacDowell Fellow in 2023 and 2026, and a Hawthornden Fellow in 2024. In 2025 he was in residence with The BAU Institute in Cassis, France.
While at MacDowell in 2023, Shinn wrote the first draft of a new play, Conscience, about a novelist/writing professor who is enlisted by a grieving woman to help her write a victim impact statement for the sentencing of the mass shooter who killed her daughter. During his 2026 residency, he completed and revised the first draft of a new play that revisits characters from two of his plays from the early 2000s.
