About
JACOB JUNTUNEN is the Founding Managing Director of Mortar Theatre, Chicago. He was named a Senior Network Playwright at Chicago Dramatists for 2010-2012; he was also Playwright in Residence at Scrap Mettle SOUL, Uptown Chicago’s only theatre for development, from 2006-2008. Further recognition includes a Fulbright Award to teach theatre at Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland); a Community Arts Assistance Program (CAAP) grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council; the Agnes Nixon New Play Award; and finalist status for the Sundance Screenwriters Workshop and the Christopher Brian Wolk Award. The Driehaus Foundation selected his play Under America for submission to the Sundance Institute Theatre Program Chicago Roundtable, and the script also received Lee Blessing and Tennessee Williams Scholarships, providing him with creative residencies at the Timberlake Playwrights Colony and the Sewanee Writers Conference, respectively. Jacob’s work as Managing Director of Mortar Theatre resulted in a profitable first season, and a successful grant application to produce the first play of their third season at the Storefront Theatre run by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.
Jacob’s plays have been produced in Houston; Austin; Ithaca; Washington, D.C.; Portland, Oregon; and in his current hometown of Chicago. There, his work was produced or developed at theatres such as the side project, Prop Thtr, Caffeine Theatre, Infamous Commonwealth, and others. Chicago dramaturgical credits include TUTA, New Leaf, Circle, Infamous Commonwealth, and Steep. His short film Breaking Bread was produced by ½-Off Productions and may be viewed in its entirety on IMDB; he was also a staff writer for the unproduced web-series Covenant Coffee. A high school dropout, Jacob trained as a playwright with Edward Albee at the University of Houston and attended Clackamas Community College (A.A.), Reed College (B.A.) and Northwestern University (Ph.D.). In fall 2011, he will begin working towards an MFA in Playwriting at Ohio University.
Recipient of multiple academic honors including a Diedrich & Johnson Scholarship at Northwestern University, he has taught writing at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago (SAIC), and theatre history at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) and as a Faculty Fulbright Fellow at Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań, Poland). He was also the faculty liaison for Chicago Circle Players, UIC’s independent, student-run theatre organization.
His scholarship includes “Repairing Reality: The Media and Homebody/Kabul in New York, 2001” appearing in Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays, and his contribution: “Mainstream Theatre, Mass Media, and the 1985 Premiere of The Normal Heart: Negotiating Forces Between Emergent and Dominant Ideologies” in the volume “We Will Be Citizens”: New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Drama. In 2011 his essays “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and Under America: How Mainstream Reviews Represent the Guilty and Obscure the Economics of the U.S. Prison Industry” and “’We Represent the Polish People’: The Western Press’ Portrayal of Tadeusz Kantor’s Cricot 2 Performances at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles” will be published in “To Have or Have Not”: New Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modernist Theatre and Polish AngloSaxon Studies, respectively. He has presented at many national and international conferences in Europe, Mexico, and the United States, garnering the Graduate Student Debut Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society (2002), and the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs Association Debut Panel Award (2005), both at Association for Theatre in Higher Education conferences.
