Playwright Biography

Gabriel Jason Dean plays have been produced or read at Theatre Row, Hangar Theatre , Aurora Theatre, Dad's Garage Theatre , Actor's Express, Horizon Theatre, FronteraFest, Source Festival, Essential Theatre, Relativity Theatre Concern, The Phoenix Theatre, Stage Door Players, The Process Theatre, Illinois State University, Emory University, Oglethorpe University and the University of Texas--Austin.

His adaptation of Beowulf is published by PlayScripts and has been produced internationally and in many states. He is the recipient of the 2010 Essential Theatre New Play Prize for Qualities of Starlight. A short play, PigSkin won the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival and is published by Samuel French. His play for children, The Transition of Doodle Pequeno, was a finalist for the Kennedy Center Summer MFA Workshop. Other plays have been finalists or semi-finalists for the Seven Devils Conference, The O’Neill Theatre Conference and the Lark Play Development Center.

Gabriel's poetry, fiction and journalism has been published in Snake Nation Review, The Tower, Eclectica Magazine, The Melic Review, and Creative Loafing. Gabriel is the recipient of several distinctions for his writing including “Favorite Local Playwright 2009” in Creative Loafing--Atlanta, the James A. Michener Playwriting Fellowship, the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs Playwriting Award, the Porter Fleming Prize for Fiction, the Sidney Lanier Prize for Poetry, and a winner of the Horizon Theatre Young Playwright's Festival.

As an award-winning actor, he's performed in over 40 plays and musicals. A little known fact: as a singer, Gabriel debuted professionally at the age of 18 at Carnegie Hall singing the solo in Kirby Shaw's jazz arrangement of “God Bless America.”

He studied the interdisciplinary art of Musical Theatre at CAP21 at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and earned his B.A. in Literary Writing with cum laude honors in Playwriting from Oglethorpe University where he also studied theatre criticism abroad at the University of Manchester in England.

Gabriel founded and facilitated the Odyssey Program, a drama/creative writing workshop for Morry's Camp, a non-profit camp for underprivileged inner city kids in New York. He is a co-founder of Relativity Theatre Concern in Atlanta, a member of the Dramatist's Guild of America, Theatre Communications Group, Austin ScriptWorks, the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis, and currently lives in Austin, Texas where— aside from pursuing his M.F.A. in Playwriting at the James A. Michener Center for Writers— he enjoys playing guitar to anyone who’ll listen and wrestling with his two VERY large, but lovable mutt dogs, Buster and Argo.