Jacob Juntunen

Wow, what to tell you about Jacob Juntunen? Long before he was the father of an elementary school kid, long before he was the head of the playwriting MFA at Southern Illinois University (SIU), and long before he lived in St. Louis, he was a little kid himself watching the puppets on Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street in California during the 1970s. He misses mainstream representations of that PBS masculinity that he still hopes to embody. Later, Jacob was a high school dropout, depressed and making sandwiches at a deli in Portland during the 1990s. In Portland, he was saved by the teachers at Clackamas Community College and he was given purpose in Houston by Edward Albee (long story; ask Jacob about it and he’ll probably do his Albee impersonation). Jacob ended up with an English degree from Reed College, and an interdisciplinary theatre PhD from Northwestern, and then he did a year at Ohio University’s MFA playwriting program, which was a weird order, doing that after the PhD, but so it goes.

For the past ten years, he’s collaborated with his students at SIU, making theatre out of nothing but a black box with blocks and cubes, and in 2016 he founded Contraband Theatre as a way to make theatre without institutional strings. Since 2000, a couple of years after he saw a scratchy VHS tape of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre with mannequins (puppets for adults!!), he’s lived in Poland repeatedly for months at a time, adding up to years in total, and Eastern Europe is dear to him. One of his most successful short plays, See Him?, was in the Belarusian Dream Theater: eighteen theaters in thirteen countries simultaneously producing plays to raise awareness about human rights violations in Belarus.

 I guess you might want to know about some of his plays? They include Professor House (a memory play with a ghost; or a ghost story with memories), See You in a Minute (a comedic pandemic play set in 2041 that has, you guessed it, puppets!), 18 Months After November (watch it on YouTube!), Hath Taken Away (a lyrical retelling of the Book of Job set in the modern Midwest), In the Shadow of His Language (showing his vexed feelings about academia), Joan’s Laughter (a kick-ass play about Joan of Arc!), and his most-produced shorts, No Winter No Worries (funny), and Saddam’s Lions (not funny). Jacob’s plays have been developed by organizations like Playwrights Horizons, Alliance Theatre, Source Festival, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center (for puppets!!), Great Plains Theatre Conference, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Chicago Dramatists, Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, and Chicago’s DCase. Jacob loves dramaturgs and he’s been lucky enough to work with the likes of Martine Kei Green-Rogers, Heather Helinsky, and Dan Smith. His plays and scholarship have been published by Routledge, Vintage, and a variety of journals. Jacob’s work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Krakow’s International Cultural Center, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition. You can read a bunch of his plays on New Play Exchange, and if you don’t have access to that, email him and he’ll gladly email you scripts: jjuntunen@yahoo.com

ScholarSHIP

As a scholar, he authored Mainstream AIDS Theatre, the Media and Gay Civil Rights: Making the Radical Palatable (Routledge: 2016). His current scholarly book project, Journeys to Impossible Places: Tadeusz Kantor, Post-Holocaust Art, and the Ghosts of Multicultural Poland, expands his geographic scope to examine artistic resistance to the genocidal discourse of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, particularly examining the theatre of Polish auteur Tadeusz Kantor. His reviews and articles have been published in Theatre Journal, European Theatre Journal, AngloSaxon Studies, Peace History, HowlRound.com, and several anthologies. He founded @STLTheatre on Instagram to connect plays with people who will love them.

Educator

Jacob Juntunen holds a doctorate from Northwestern University’s Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre and Drama, as well as degrees from Ohio University, Reed College, and Clackamas Community College. He is currently Associate Professor of Dramatic Theory, Criticism, and Playwriting at Southern Illinois University (SIU), Carbondale, where he heads the playwriting MFA and PhD programs and is the Director of Graduate Studies. He is also cross-appointed faculty in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. In Spring 2011 he was a Fulbright Professor at Adam Mickiweicz University (AMU), in Poznań, Poland. He was invited back to AMU in Fall 2017 as a Distinguished Guest Professor.

Professor

In a world that demands results, a goal that emphasizes process over outcome is rare.  Nevertheless, I see it as my duty, as a teacher, to offer students tools that will aid in the process of becoming lifelong learners. I do this so that they can become better readers; thinkers; speakers; researchers; artists; and writers even after they graduate. I can see no better method of furthering this lifelong process than by encouraging my students to be engaged questioners.

Producer

Currently I am the Founding Artistic Director of Contraband Theatre (2016-present) where I have been lead producer on See You in a Minute (2023), Am I Dangerous? (2024), and Professor House (2025) in addition to several staged readings and workshops. I am also a freelance producer helping artists with strategies for making their work rather than waiting for gatekeepers to let them through. In Chicago, I was the Founding Managing Director of Mortar Theatre (2010-2012).