Leah Nanako Winkler is an award-winning playwright and TV Writer from Kamakura, Japan and Lexington Kentucky. Her plays include God Said This , Two Mile Hollow , Kentucky, Hot Asian Doctor Husband and The Brightest Thing in the World as well as many short plays all produced Off-Broadway and regionally. Accolades and fellowships: Yale Drama Series Prize, Mark O’Donnell Prize from The Actors Fund and Playwrights Horizons, Audible’s Emerging Playwrights Fund, Jerome New York Fellow at the Lark, Francesca Primus Prize, and a 2020 Steinberg Playwright Award . She is published by American Theater Magazine, Nanjing University’s Stage and Screen Reviews, Yale University Press, Backstage, Smith and Krauss, Samuel French and Dramatists Play Service. TV credits include A24’s Ramy, where she along with the other writers won a Peabody Award, Love Life on HBO MAX, Schmigadoon!, among others. She is currently a co-executive producer and writer on Elsbeth. Upcoming: Crazy Rich Asians the musical.
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Leah started out self-producing experimental comedies with her now defunct theater company Everywhere Theatre Group from 2006-2012 at places like the New Ohio Theatre, The Brick Theatre, Dixon Place, the Ontological Hysteric Theater/Incubator Arts Project the Prelude Festival and random boats and bars. You can watch a partial archive of ETG’s history here. She has two collections of short plays, Nagoriyuki & Other Short Plays and The Lowest Form Of Writing .
She has served on the faculty of New Group’s Urban Arts Initiative, ESPA at Primary Stages and the Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s College, as well as teaching as a guest artist at schools around the country. Leah is an alumnus of Youngblood at the Ensemble Studio Theater, terraNova Groundbreakers Playwrights Group, the Dorothy Strelsin New American Playwrights Group at Primary Stages and the Lab at WP Theater where she was a 2016-2018 Time Warner Fellow. She was a Ucross fellow with the Sundance Institute. She is currently a labbie at Ma Yi, a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre and on the board of Page 73. She’s has had commissions from WP Theater, Yale Rep EST/SLOAN, and Disney/Marvel.
She attended Tates Creek High School and has a MFA from Brooklyn College.
LEAH NANAKO WINKLER 