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Ensemble Member Jenny Connell Davis
Ensemble Member

JENNY CONNELL DAVIS’s plays include Dragon Play, Scientific Method, Goddess of Mercy, and End of Shift. Her stage plays have been developed or produced with the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Playwrights’ Center, Icicle Creek, ACT in Seattle, the Araca Group, The Gift Theatre, Stage Left and ATC in Chicago, Ars Nova, Asolo Rep, NAATCO, Theater Mitu, New York Stage and Film, Shrewd Productions, Impact Theatre in Berkeley, Chance Theatre, SPACE at Ryder Farm, and Team Sunshine Performance Corporation.

Her short films have screened at festivals worldwide, including SxSW and Toronto. She adapted bestselling novelist Jennifer Weiner’s first YA novel, The Littlest Bigfoot, for screen – it is currently under development with Fox/Disney and Good Fear Films. Her first pilot script, Amicus, a supreme court drama, sold to Astronauts Wanted/Sony. Her adaptation of Dragon Play is currently in development with Iconoclast Films.

She has been a finalist or semi-finalist for Seven Devils, BAPF, the Nicholl (twice), and the Heideman Award, has been an honorable mention on the Kilroys list (2014, 2015, 2016) and for the Jane Chambers Award (2014), and has been twice-nominated for both the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Lark/PONY fellowship. She is an Affiliate Artist with the Playwrights’ Center, former member of the Ars Nova Play Group, and a recipient of grants and/or commissions from Ars Nova, ScriptWorks, The Playwrights’ Center, and the Network of Ensemble Theatres. Jenny was the 2014-2015 Hot Seat Local Writer in Residence at Baltimore’s Center Stage Theater, where she helped organize their new Playwrights Collective, the 2016 Resident Playwright at Chance Theatre in Anaheim, CA, and an inaugural member of the Hyde Park Theater Playwrights Group in 2019/2020.

“I write,” she says, “to create the kind of roles I couldn’t find, growing up. Complicated young women, older women going for broke, and girls with real problems who could kick your butt. I try to use every project as an opportunity to expand representation across race, class, age, gender and worldview, so that my friends and I can see ourselves on stage and screen, and so that our kids grow up doing the same.”

Jenny believes in subversive humor and the power of people who are a little bit broken.

She trained as an actor at Court and Steppenwolf theatres in Chicago, and in playwriting at University of Texas at Austin.  She has taught acting at UT Austin, and playwriting at the Berkeley Carroll School in New York, at UT Austin, and for the Playwrights’ Center.  TV/Film: Verve Talent, Management: Circle of Confusion. She lives in Austin, Texas.