Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright. He won the 2014 Obie Award for Best New American Play for his plays Appropriate and An Octoroon. His plays Gloria and Everybody were finalists for the 2016 and 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, respectively. He was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2016. Early life Jacobs-Jenkins was born in Washington, DC. His father, Benjamin Jenkins, is a retired dentist, and his mother, Patricia Jacobs, is a business consultant. He graduated from Princeton University in 2006, with a major in anthropology, and earned a master's degree in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2007. He has taught playwriting at the Tisch School and also at Princeton. He graduated from the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrights Program at The Juilliard School. Jacob-Jenkins worked at the New Yorker where he edited and wrote reviews.