About
After Jacob Juntunen’s first play was produced by Edward Albee at Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, his plays were produced across the country. He is a Senior Network Playwright at Chicago Dramatists, a member of the Dramatists’ Guild, and the Resident Playwright at Uptown Chicago’s only theatre for development, Scrap Mettle SOUL, working to give voice to Chicago’s underrepresented citizens. Furthering that work, he writes in collaboration with veterans as part of the Vet Arts Project, particularly people who have recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan; he works with those veterans in particular because many students in his college courses are paying for their education with military benefits and this is his way of giving back. He is also co-founder and Managing Director of Mortar Theatre Company.
Under America, his latest script, was one of five selected by the Driehaus Foundation for potential workshops by the Sundance Institute, and has had three staged readings: first at Gallery 400, then at Prop Thtr, and most recently at the Side Project, all in Chicago. It is slated for its Chicago premiere at Mortar Theatre in Fall 2010. His first feature screenplay, After the Funeral, was a finalist in the 2010 Sundance Screenwriters Lab.
Recipient of multiple academic and playwriting honors including a Diedrich & Johnson Scholarship at Northwestern University, a Lee Blessing Scholarship to attend the Timberlake Writers’ Colony, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to attend the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Jacob Juntunen teaches theatre history and an honors seminar at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC); he is also the current faculty liaison for Chicago Circle Players, UIC’s independent, student-run theatre organization. A high school dropout, Jacob trained as a playwright with Edward Albee at the University of Houston and attended Clackamas Community College (A.A. 1996), Reed College (B.A. 1999) and Northwestern University (Ph.D. 2007). He taught at Northwestern University (2002-2007), and began teaching at UIC in 2005. In addition, he teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.
His chapter “Repairing Reality: The Media and Homebody/Kabul in New York, 2001” appeared in Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays, and the volume “We Will Be Citizens”: New Essays on Gay and Lesbian Drama includes his contribution: “Mainstream Theatre, Mass Media, and the 1985 Premiere of The Normal Heart: Negotiating Forces Between Emergent and Dominant Ideologies.” His essay “Imprisoned by Realism: How Realistic Dramaturgy Represents Incarceration and Obscures the Economics of the U.S. Prison Industry” will be published in “To Have or Have Not”: New Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modernist Theatre in 2011. He has presented at many national and international conferences 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.
