Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder is the 2024 Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow. Her plays include Gee's Bend, Fresh Kills, The Flagmaker of Market Street, The Furniture of Home, White Lightning, Provenance, and Everything That’s Beautiful.  Her plays have been produced at the Royal Court (London), Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center, Cleveland Play House, KC Rep, Northlight, the Arden, B Street Theatre, and Hartford Stage, among others.  Her one act, “Santa Doesn’t Come to the Holiday Inn” was featured in the Marathon of One Act Plays at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. 

 

Her theatre for young audiences play, Georgia Mae James Unplugs America premiered at The Growing Stage in July 2022.  She workshopped her new solo piece, Zelda in the Backyard, at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's Southern Writers' Festival in July 2022.  The play had its world premiere at ASF in the summer of 2024. 

 

Her play, Looks Like Pretty, which explores racial bias and the development of color photography, was a co-commission by the Geva Theatre and the Sloan Foundation. It was scheduled for its world premiere at the Geva Theatre in the spring of 2020 (Covid cancelation).  The play was featured on the prestigious Kilroy's List. It was most recently featured in the 2022 Play-By-Play series at the Pioneer Theatre. 

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Her play The Light of the World, explores our relationship with Confederate iconography. It was workshopped at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s Southern Writers’ Festival in 2018.  Other plays include A Requiem for August Moon (Pioneer Theatre workshop), The Bone Orchard (Denver Center commission, Great Plains Theatre Conference), and a short play for the acclaimed My America, Too project (Baltimore Center Stage), as well as four commissions from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.  Her short play, All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go, won the 2023 10:4 Tenn New Play award and was published in the Ponder Review. Elyzabeth is the recipient of the Osborn Award given by the American Theatre Critics Association and is a graduate of the dramatic writing program at New York University. She is a proud alumnus of Youngblood at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. 

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Elyzabeth wrote for two seasons of the serialized podcast, In Good Company. She hosts the podcast series Teaching Theatre, produced by HowlRound. Elyzabeth was also a staff writer on the short-lived CBS show Love Monkey.   

 

In 2018 Elyzabeth traveled with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival on their State of the South tour where they hosted town hall discussions in 12 cities throughout the South as they explored the changing face of Southern identity. The project culminated in a documentary and was featured in the New York Times. 

 

Elyzabeth is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South where she teaches playwriting.