Writing
I write plays and musicals about women choosing lives larger than the ones imagined for them, often exploring questions of power, agency, and the systems that shape our choices. My work pairs emotional depth with a love of heightened theatricality, genre, and stories that invite audiences to imagine new possibilities for themselves and the world around them.
Selected Recognition
Featured Plays and Musicals
The City of Ember
Book & Lyrics by S. Dylan Zwickel
Music & Lyrics by Step Pażernov
Based on the novel by Jeanne DuPrau
In a city surrounded by endless darkness, two teenagers race to save the only home they’ve ever known before its failing lights go out for good.
Based on Jeanne DuPrau’s beloved novel, The City of Ember follows dreamer Lina and hot-head Doon, two teenagers who refuse to accept that their crumbling city is beyond saving. When Lina discovers the fragments of a mysterious document that may hold the key to Ember’s survival, she and Doon descend into its shadowy, dripping tunnels, uncovering political corruption and secrets buried for generations. Part cautionary tale and part call to action, The City of Ember uses an idiosyncratic chamber-pop score to tell a gritty, suspenseful story of greed, environmental disaster, and the consequences of denial—and the courage required to change course before it’s too late.
Orchard Project Finalist • Two-time O'Neill NMTC Semifinalist • NYC Reading
The Moss Maidens
When a group of ordinary Dutch teenage girls discover they make surprisingly effective assassins, an unlikely new branch of the Resistance is born.
The Netherlands, 1941. Isa, Rini, Silke, Helena, and Floor spend their days gossiping about classmates, dreaming about their futures, and trying not to attract the attention of the Nazis occupying their town. But when Rini, the romantic of the group, takes a walk in the woods with a Nazi who she’s hoping might be secretly a Resistance fighter and also her soulmate and sort-of-accidentally ends up killing him, the girls make a startling discovery: even in a time when no one knows whom they can trust, no one sees teenage girls as dangerous. Soon, a single impulsive act becomes an increasingly perilous campaign of resistance—and a coming-of-age story about friendship, courage, and the exhilaration and cost of discovering just how much power you can wield.
Best Play and Best Ensemble, SheNYC Summer Theater Festival • Parity Development Award Honorable Mention • Princess Grace Award Semifinalist • O'Neill NPC Semifinalist • NYC and London Readings
The Smuggler, or a New Jane
Van-life influencer Hannah-May has built a following showcasing the small-town charm of the American South—but her picture-perfect road trips and luxury leggings are a cover for an underground abortion-pill smuggling operation.
In a very-near-future America, former pageant queen Hannah-May and her boyfriend Ethan crisscross states where abortion access has all but disappeared, following coded pleas for help hidden among their social media comments. But when a secretive teenage girl stows away in their van, what should be another delivery becomes something far more dangerous. The Smuggler, or A New Jane is a tense road play about reproductive freedom, the complicated power of beauty, and how far the commitment to believing women really extends.
O'Neill NPC Semifinalist • Blue Ink Award Semifinalist • Parity Development Award Semifinalist • Terrence McNally New Play Incubator Semifinalist • Hartford, CT Reading
The Making and Breaking of Glass
A retelling of Sophocles’ Theban tragedies that reimagines Antigone, Ismene, Polynices, Eteocles, and Haemon as the privileged young heirs of a CW-style teen melodrama, watching their glamorous world unravel through plague, family warfare, and revolution.
O'Neill NPC Semifinalist • SheNYC Semifinalist • NYC and London Readings
Broken City
Music by Melissa Miles
In a violent, mystical metropolis, a young woman impersonates a legendary mud creature to inspire a revolution—only to find herself on the opposite side of a war from the brother she loves.
NYC Readings
The Cardioluthier
In a world where human hearts take the form of miniature violins, two cardioluthiers—one who builds hearts and one who repairs them—discover across two generations that love can be neither perfected nor made unbreakable.
The Blank Theatre's Young Playwrights Festival (Los Angeles) • Workshops in Los Angeles, CT, and NY
Screenwriting
My screen work grows from the same fascination that drives my theatre: ambitious stories about people stepping beyond the lives imagined for them, often set against larger social and political forces. I’m drawn to film and television for the opportunity to expand those stories into worlds unconstrained by the physical stage, while bringing with me a playwright’s attention to character, structure, and the tension between the intimate and the epic.
OTHERS
One-Hour Pilot · Coming-of-Age Sci-Fi Adventure
After dozens of people report a UFO over Berkshire County on Labor Day 1969, two teenage girls assemble a band of misfits to uncover what really happened that night—and whether some of them were taken aboard.
American Zoetrope Screenplay Competition Finalist
THE MOSS MAIDENS
Feature · Historical Thriller
Inglorious Basterds meets Little Women (2019)
In the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, six ordinary teenage girls discover that no one sees them as dangerous—and turn that invisibility into a deadly weapon, luring German soldiers to their deaths as they build an unlikely resistance cell of their own.
POLLY'S
One-Hour Pilot · Period Drama
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel meets Boardwalk Empire
Co-written with Alanna J. Smith
In Prohibition-era New York, 4'11" Jewish immigrant Polly Adler presides over the city’s most exclusive bordello, where elite call girls entertain celebrities, mobsters, and intellectuals—and sex, money, power, and crime collide behind closed doors.