Les Hunter

Dr. Les Hunter is a theatre historian and playwright. His academic research focus is on 20th century American theatre and playwriting pedagogy. His articles and reviews have appeared in American Theatre Magazine, The Dramatist, Text & Presentation, HowlRound, Theatre Journal, The Wallace Stevens Review, Ecumenica, Cutbank, Theatre Survey, and the edited collections "Performing the Progressive Era" (U Iowa Press), "Experimental O’Neill" (Rare Bird), and "Teaching Critical Performance Theory" (Routledge). In 2014, Hunter attended the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University.

As a playwright his work contemplates the way that theatre specifically can shed new light on emerging problems of selfhood. His plays include "Down by Contact" (Dobama Theatre and Playwrights Local); "Weimar" (Baldwin Wallace University); "To the Orchard" (Playwrights Local and Jewish Play Project International Playwriting Contest finalist); and with his wife Elana, "Aponibolinayen in the Sky" (Talespinner Children’s Theatre). He wrote for all three parts of the collaboratively written, NYC hit, "The Jackson Heights Trilogy" (Theatre 167). Playscripts, Brooklyn Publishers, and Indie Theatre publish and license his plays.

He is the Ohio Regional Representative for the Dramatists Guild of America, and the 2019/2020 Cleveland Public Theatre Premiere Fellow for playwriting. In 2020, Hunter was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for literature. He is a member of the Playwrights GYM at Dobama Theatre. He has received residencies from Ora Lerman and Millikin University. He was previously the curator of new plays at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in New York City, literary director of Theatre 167, and co-founder of the Brooklyn Playwrights Collective. His creative prose appears in Fiction Southeast, Barnhouse, and the anthology "Dating Games." From 2018-2020, he was the president of the board of Playwrights Local. Dr. Hunter is an associate professor of English at Baldwin Wallace University, where he received the 2019 Bechberger Award for Human Development.