Award winning playwright Craig Thornton is a graduate of NYU (B.F.A.) and Goddard College (M.F.A.) and the American Film Institute where he studied screenwriting. In 2012-2013 he was artist-in-residence at Empire State College. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, and regionally and have placed as finalists in several national playwriting contests; this includes the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Conference, Trustus, and the Reva Shiner Comedy playwriting Award.
The High Cost of Heating was selected to participate in Northern Writes New Play Festival at Penobscott Theater, Bangor Maine and was selected as runner-up in the Yale Drama Series Prize for 2015 (out of nearly 1,500 entries). The L.A. production of Happy Birthday, Tina Marie was pick of the week in the L.A. Reader, hailed as “brilliant and witty” by the L.A. Times and is housed in the Central L.A. Library as one of the best plays produced that year. In My Shoes a docudrama about the effects of parental deployment on teens during the recent Middle East conflicts has seen several productions and received national attention in a story featured on CNN.
Craig was asked to participate in a study mandated by Congress about the effects of deployment on communities with a large military population, highlighting the therapeutic power of theater. In 2013 he served on an academic/craft panel on using true stories and historical events in drama at both at the AWP conference in Boston and the Dramatist Guild Conference in Chicago and again at the AWP in 2018.
Other awards and grants include a MacDowell Fellowship, NY State Arts Starts Grants, NYFA SOS grants and a Public Fellowship Arts Grant. He teaches screenwriting at the New House School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and is an award winning producer and web journalist at WWNYTV.
