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Rebecca Gilman is an American playwright. She attended Middlebury College, graduated from Birmingham-Southern College, and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa. She lives in Chicago and serves on the board of the Dramatists Guild of America.
Gilman was the first American playwright to win an Evening Standard Award. She serves on the advisory board for Chicago Dramatists. She has received the 2008 Harper Lee Award.
Her most widely known works are Spinning Into Butter, a play that addresses political correctness and racial identity, and Boy Gets Girl, which was included in Time Magazine's List of the Best Plays and Musicals of the Decade.
A production of her adaptation of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was the occasion of a protest by actors who felt only a deaf person should play a deaf person on stage. She is an associate professor in Northwestern University's Department of Radio-TV-Film and core faculty in Northwestern's MFA in Writing for the Screen+Stage program.
When asked about her influences, she remarked that "I'm a big fan of Wallace Shawn. He's incredibly smart and the only writer who writes about intellectuals in a complicated and even contradictory way. He's really funny, too. I also like Donald Margulies, Kenneth Lonergan, and Conor McPherson...Caryl Churchill, Kia Corthron, and a Chicago playwright, Jamie Pachino."
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