Watson: Meet the Playwright

Madeleine George grew up in Amherst, Massachussets and began writing plays as a high school student at Ameherst Regional High School. She participated in the Young Playwrights Festival at the Playwright’s Horizon and The Public Theatre as a teenager. Ms. George then attended Cornell University where she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1996. She then obtained an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. 

Since then, Ms. George’s plays have been produced at Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, Shotgun Players, and Perseverance Theater, among other venues. She has been the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, the Princess Grace Playwriting Award, the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, and the Jane Chambers Award. A resident playwright at New Dramatists, George was also a founding member of the collective 13P (Thirteen Playwrights, Inc.), which won an Obie Award. Her play The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. She also won the Whiting Award for Drama in 2016 for the same play. 

For seven years, George was the director of the Bard College satellite campus at Bayview Correctional Facility in Manhattan. She is originally from Amherst, Massachusetts, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.