DGI INSTRUCTOR | PIP MENTOR

WINTER MILLER

Interests: New work, first draft, revision, writing from the heart

First thing we’ll do is establish what’s drawing you to tell this story, why you’re the playwright to do it, and what is the first vision about the play you had–could be an image, could be a press clipping, but we need to know why you’re telling it and where your instincts lie. In our work together we’ll find what elements are missing from your story and how you can strengthen the work so that it’s focused, taut, and matches the genre you envision. I’m not concerned with telling you how to write your play so much as asking you the questions that are going to unlock the riddles of your play. We’ll look at where you’re stuck and why; the architecture of your play as a whole; ask if the characters's drives are clear; and if their actions are authentic and plausible within the world of your play. Theater is magic, so anything is possible in a play–our job as writer is to dream it up with our future collaborators.

Raised by activist feminist parents and schooled by Quakers, Winter Miller is surprisingly amusing. She makes and champions art to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Eartha Kitt once held her left hand for five minutes.

Recent works include the 2022 premiere of When Monica Met Hillary “Intense, discomfiting, revelatory,” The Miami Herald; children’s picture book, Not A Cat, from Tilbury; and the libretto for the 3-D spatial audio radio opera No One Is Forgotten with composers Paola Prestini and Sxip Shirey, adapted from her play, which Winter produced and directed, called “a profoundly devastating play,” in The New Yorker.

Her award-winning play In Darfur premiered in a sold-out run at The Public Theater, NYC. She is a founding member of the Obie-winning 13Playwrights. A former journalist, Winter wrote 90+articles for The New York Times, and is profiled in The New Yorker, Bomb, New York Magazine, and NPR.