Bio

Justin Warner is a playwright, lyricist, and freelance writer based in New York City. His plays have been produced in over 25 cities, including NYC, London, LA, DC, and San Francisco. He is a member of the Tony Award-winning BMI Musical Theater Workshop, and a winner of its Jerry Harrington Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement. His musicals have been produced, developed, or showcased by the Public Theater, Vineyard Arts Project, the HBMG Foundation, the Lincoln Center Holiday Songbook, the ASCAP/Disney Workshop with Stephen Schwartz, Vital Children's Theatre, Raw Impressions, Musical Mondays, the Triad, the York Theatre, and the Greenwich House Music School Theater Lab.

A Philadelphia-area native, Justin studied biological psychology at Haverford College, spent a year as a visiting undergrad at Oxford University, and began his career as a science writer in Washington, DC. He was a staff writer/editor for Kinetic City Super Crew, a children's radio show produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and funded by National Science Foundation. During Justin's tenure, Kinetic City won a Peabody Award alongside This American Life, Law & Order, and The Simpsons.

In 1996, Justin and seven friends co-founded Washington Improv Theater, which evolved into DC's leading improv comedy troupe. Justin performed, taught, and toured with WIT through 2003, appearing in featured slots at the Chicago Improv Festival, the Seattle Improv Festival, and the Del Close Marathon at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York.   Today, WIT's many resident companies perform hundreds of shows a year, and its training program serves thousands of students.

While in DC, Justin began writing short plays, and was granted a full scholarship to Catholic University's MFA playwriting program. As a graduate student, he interned at New Dramatists, won the Kennedy Center-ACTF's Region II playwriting contest, and was a finalist for the Princess Grace Award, the Actors Theatre of Louisville's Heideman Award, and the Javits Fellowship in the Humanities.

Justin moved to New York in 2003.  His many productions since then include the full-length plays American Whup-Ass (AlterTheater, SF; Global Age Project winner) and Impostors (NEUROFest, NYC; Union Theatre, London), the children's musical Cinderella's Mice (Vital Theatre), for which he wrote the book and additional lyrics, his full evening of short comedies, Screwups (NYC & Birmingham, AL), three commissioned Gilbert & Sullivan adaptations for middle school performers, and short plays in theaters all over the US.  His plays are published by Samuel French and Original Works, and many of his monologues are published in Smith & Kraus anthologies. 

Justin was a finalist for the 2019 Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre, the Jonathan Larson Grants, and the Sundance Theatre Lab.  Currently, he's working on the libretto for a musical adaptation of Andrew Solomon's FAR FROM THE TREE, under the direction of Michael Greif (Broadway's DEAR EVAN HANSEN, RENT, NEXT TO NORMAL).  He is also a Clinical Associate Professor of Expository Writing at NYU, presently teaching in the Tisch School of the Arts.  He lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with his wife and two children.

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