Playwright

Before Jacob Juntunen was a father heading the playwriting MFA at SIU and living in St. Louis, he was a 1970s California kid watching PBS puppets. In the 1990s, Jacob was a high school dropout making sandwiches at a deli in Portland. The teachers at Clackamas Community College and Edward Albee saved him. In 1998, he saw a VHS tape of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre and that made him live in Poland repeatedly. His plays include Professor House (St. Louis Theater Circle Awards Outstanding New Play nomination, 2026), See You in a Minute (St. Louis Theater Circle Awards Outstanding New Play nomination, 2024), 18 Months After November, Hath Taken Away, In the Shadow of His Language, and Joan’s Laughter. He founded Contraband Theatre in 2016. You can read his plays on New Play Exchange.

Scholar

Jacob Juntunen 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 is the founder of @STLTheatre, an instagram site providing microreviews to connect plays with people who will love them.

Honors

Jacob’s scholarship and playwriting have been supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis (RAC), the Tectonic Theatre, Kraków’s International Cultural Center, the Illinois Arts Council, SIU’s Seed Grant, and Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE).