Lauren Gunderson
Playwright
Handful Players' 2011/2012 season

Lauren is writing a play for Handful Players about the magic and mystery of science and math The play will include the music of The Fillmore and will be performed at San Francisco's Yoshi's Jazz Club in May, 2012.

Lauren is a resident playwright at the Playwrights Foundation and is also a screenwriter and short story author and writes for The Huffington Post. She teaches and speaks on the intersection of science and theatre. Her work has received national praise and awards including the Berrilla Kerr Award for American Theatre, Global Age Project, Young Playwright's Award, Eric Bentley New Play Award and Essential Theatre Prize. She received her MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch School, where she was also a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship.

Her musical, "The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful and Her Dog!" for The Kennedy Center premiered in October, 2011. She has commissions for 2 additional musicals with The Kennedy Center, a musical with Harry Connick Jr., and new plays for South Coast Rep, Marin Theatre Company, and SF Playhouse. She has developed plays with Second Stage, Red Bull, and Primary Stages in NYC; New Rep in Boston; Playwrights Foundation, Crowded Fire, TheatreWorks, Aurora Theatre, and The Magic Theatre in San Francisco; Kitchen Dog Theatre in Dallas; Synchronicity, Actor Express and Horizon Theatre in Atlanta; JAW at Portland Center Stage in Portland, and others. She received a Sloan Science Script Award (2008) for her screenplay "Grand Unification" and her short story, "The Ascending Life", won the Norembega Short Fiction Award and was published in the anthology, The Shape of Content; her science play "Background" was published in ISOTOPE: A Journal of Nature and Science Writing. Her string theory poem "Hook of a Number" was published in the anthology Riffing On Strings.