Tina Howe

Award-winning playwright Tina Howe served as the head of Hunter’s MFA in Playwriting program from 2010 until 2015. An esteemed educator as well as a formidable playwright, Howe was a beloved member of the artistic community to which she belonged, and well-known to have infused her art into the everyday. Most recognized for her Tony-nominated play Coastal Disturbances, Howe wrote 14 full-length plays, including two Pulitzer prize finalists, Pride’s Crossing and Painting Churches.

Howe’s pioneering work is widely recognized for expanding the dimensions of female characters on stage, when the theatre of the 1970s had been dominated by a mostly male viewpoint. As she told an interviewer in 2004 on the CUNY TV program Women in Theater, “In those years many artistic directors were men who were interested only in plays in which female characters were victims.” It was harder, she said, to get support for a play that featured “a strong woman, a sexy woman, a smart woman.”

Howe was a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, the Rockefeller Grant for Distinguished Playwriting, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for Master American Dramatist. In addition to Hunter College, Howe taught at New York University, UCLA, Columbia University, and Carnegie Mellon.