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.
Winter is writing the libretto for the radio opera No One Is Forgotten with composers Paola Prestini and Sxip Shirey, adapted from her play No One Is Forgotten, which she produced and directed at Rattlestick Theater, NYC, which The New Yorker called “a profoundly devastating play.”
Recent work includes the premiere of When Monica Met Hillary at Miami New Drama, directed by Margot Bordelon, the release of her children’s picture book, Not A Cat, a memoir by a cat who is not convinced he’s a cat.
Her award-winning play In Darfur premiered in a sold-out run at The Public Theater, NYC, followed by a standing room only performance at the historic 1800-seat Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a first for a play by a woman. In Darfur has played theaters across the United States. Winter traveled to the Sudan border with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
Select plays include: Spare Rib, described in a New Yorker profile as a “quasi comic abortion drama,” The Penetration Play (13P) which The New York Times called “cracklingly funny,” Look At Us (The Cherry Lane), Conspicuous (Keen), and Animalia Arthropoda. Winter’s plays are published by Samuel French and Playscripts and appear in various anthologies.
Winter is a founding member of the Obie-winning collective 13Playwrights. She has been awarded prizes or fellowships with NYFA, Sundance Institute, Djerassi (MacElwee Fellow), Bogliasco Foundation, Cherry Lane Mentor Project, Nancy Dean Lesbian Playwriting Prize Finalist, Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center, The Playwrights Center, Civilians, National New Play Network, New Georges, and SLAC. Play commissioners include Joe’s Pub, Miami New Drama, The Guthrie, Nature’s Darlings, and Keen Company.
She has created theater with young people surviving in war-torn areas of Northern Uganda and Palestine, and in LGBTQIA communities in NYC. She received a BA from Smith College, an MFA from Columbia University, and is a proud affiliate of New Georges and The Playwrights Center, and was elected NYC’s first Dramatists Guild Representative.
Winter has taught in MFA programs with The New School and Queens University of Charlotte and undergraduates at Boston University and SUNY Purchase. She has lectured at Princeton, NYU, and Pace, and has led writing workshops with The New Group, Primary Stages, New York Theater Workshop, and Arts Connection.
A former journalist, Winter wrote 90+ articles for The New York Times, and is profiled in The New Yorker, Bomb, New York Magazine, and on NPR’s Brian Lehrer and All of It with Alison Stewart. She has essays in the anthologies “Pretty Bitches” and “Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists.”