Emma Watkins is a playwright & educator based in New York.

Her play Pretend it’s Pretend will be produced by LCT3 in 2027. She has been the runner-up for New Dramatists’ Princess Grace Award and the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Award and was included on the Playwrights’ Center’s Venturous List. Her plays have been developed by Lincoln Center Theater, Ashland New Plays Festival, Theatre Masters, and PlayPenn. She’s been published by Concord Theatricals/Sam French and Routledge. 

Emma is under commission from the Atlantic Theatre Company, South Coast Repertory and Ensemble Studio Theatre/Sloan and is a New Georges Affiliated Artist.

Her teaching spans playwriting, Shakespeare through Performance, documentary and devised theatre, and undergraduate academic writing. She holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from UT Austin, an M.A. with Distinction in Welsh & Celtic Studies from Cardiff University (Fulbright Fellow), and a B.A. magna cum laude in English from Princeton University.

Beyond writing, she loves foraging for chanterelles, shape-note singing, and listening for hermit thrushes on the Appalachian Trail.

NEWS
Pretend it’s Pretend will be part of Lincoln Center Theater’s 2026-2027 Season, directed by Annie Tippe at LCT3
Together with Lauren Keating and Doaa Ouf, I’ll be in residence at New Georges to make The Night Custodian, a play about making darkness, told through constellations and heavy machinery ballets
Pretend it’s Pretend is one of the four winners of the Ashland New Play Festival. I’ll be out there for the festival in October!
I received an EST/Sloan Commission to write my play Very Rapidly, Over A Few Tens of Thousands of Years
Pretend it’s Pretend was named the Runner-Up for the 2024 Princess Grace Award from New Dramatists
The Courtship Ritual of Sandhill Cranes was part of the Take Ten Theatre Masters Festival in NY
Pretend it’s Pretend was performed as part of the UTNT (UT New Theatre) Festival in Austin TX