I'm Glad About You (Rebeck) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—February 19, 1958
• Where—Kenwood, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Notre Dame; M.A., M.F.A., Ph.D., Brandeis University
• Awards—Edgar Award; Athena Film Festival Award (see below)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York


Theresa Rebeck is an American playwright, television writer, and novelist. Her work has appeared on the Broadway and Off-Broadway stage, in film, and on television. Among her awards are the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award. In 2012, she received the Athena Film Festival Award for Excellence as a Playwright and Author of Films, Books, and Television.

Early life and education
Rebeck was born in Kenwood, Ohio, and graduated from Cincinnati's Ursuline Academy in 1976. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Notre Dame in 1980, and followed that with three degrees from Brandeis University: an MA in 1983, a M.F.A. in Playwriting in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Victorian era melodrama, awarded in 1989.
Career

Plays
Past New York productions of her work include Mauritius on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre in a Manhattan Theater Club production; The Scene, The Water’s Edge, Loose Knit, The Family of Mann and Spike Heels at Second Stage Theatre; Bad Dates and The Butterfly Collection at Playwrights Horizons; and View of the Dome at New York Theatre Workshop.

Omnium Gatherum (co-written, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003) was featured at the Humana Festival, and had a commercial run at the Variety Arts Theatre in 2003. Her play The Understudy, premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the summer of 2008, with a cast including Reg Rogers, Bradley Cooper and Kristen Johnson, and ran in New York at the Roundabout Theatre from October 2009 - January 2010, featuring Julie White, Justin Kirk, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar in the cast.

Her play Seminar, starring Alan Rickman, opened on Broadway in 2011; it later opened at the San Francisco Playhouse, receiving outstanding reviews. Poor Behavior premiered at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum in 2011 and opened in 2014 at Primary Stages on Off-Broadway. Her play Fool premiered at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, in 2014.

Screenplays/TV
In television, Rebeck has written for Dream On, Brooklyn Bridge, L.A. Law, American Dreamer, Maximum Bob, First Wave, and Third Watch. She has been a writer/producer for Canterbury’s Law, Smith, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and NYPD Blue. Through March 2012 she was one of the executive producers for the NBC musical series Smash, which she created, and which also debuted in 2012. Her produced feature film screenplays include Harriet the Spy, Gossip, and the independent feature Sunday on the Rocks.

Books and essays, etc.
Rebeck’s other publications include Free Fire Zone, a book of comedic essays about writing and show business. Her first novel, Three Girls and Their Brother, was published in 2008. Her second novel, I'm Glad About You, was released in 2016. She has also written for American Theatre magazine and has had excerpts of her plays published in the Harvard Review.

Recognition
She has received awards including the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, the Writers Guild of America Award for Episodic Drama, the Hispanic Images Imagen Award, and the Peabody Award, all for her work on NYPD Blue.

She has won the National Theatre Conference Award (for The Family of Mann), and was awarded the William Inge New Voices Playwriting Award in 2003 for The Bells. Mauritius was originally produced at Boston’s Huntington Theatre, where it received the 2007 IRNE Award for Best New Play as well as the Elliot Norton Award. In 2010, Rebeck was honored with the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for an American playwright in mid-career.

Rebeck is a board member of The Dramatists Guild and the Lark Play Development Center in New York City, and has taught at Brandeis University and Columbia University. In 2014 she joined the faculty of the University of Houston School of Theatre and Dance as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Playwriting.

Rebeck lives with her husband, Jess Lynn, and two children, Cooper and Cleo, in Brooklyn. Her first novel Three Girls and their Brother is dedicated to both Cooper and Cleo.

In an article in the New York Times in September 2007, she said that her plays were about "betrayal and treason and poor behavior. A lot of poor behavior." (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/16/2016.)