Playwright

a.k.
payne

(they/she)

a.k. payne is a playwright, artist-theorist, and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their plays love on and engage the interdependencies of Black pasts, presents, and futures and seek to find/remember language that might move us towards our collective liberation(s). They hold a B.A. in English and African American Studies from Yale University and an M.F.A. in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from fka Yale School of Drama. A 2023-2024 Van Lier New Voices Fellow, their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award, and a 3x finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the largest international prize for women+ playwrights. Their work has been developed with the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project, Great Plains Theater Commons New Play Conference, and Manhattan Theatre Club’s Groundworks Lab. She is currently a resident artist/fellow with National Black Theatre’s I Am SOUL Playwright Residency and Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh (The Pittsburgh Foundation). They are a proud graduate of Pittsburgh Public Schools; grandchild of the U.S. Great Migration; descendant of a music teacher and a carpenter, who both march every year with their unions in Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade; an nb & genderqueer abolitionist affected in community by the “New Jim Crow;” and of a great lineage of Black women storytellers and living-room archivists; all of which deeply informs, uplifts, and amplifies their work as a playwright, community organizer, and spacemaker.