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Tina Howe (born November 21, 1937 in New York City) is an American playwright. She is the daughter of CBS broadcast journalist Quincy Howe, the granddaughter of biographer Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe and the great-granddaughter of the first Episcopal Bishop of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Howe graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. She is married to historian Norman Levy and has two children.

Tina Howe’s most important plays include “Birth and After Birth”, “Museum”, “The Art of Dining”, “Painting Churches”, “Coastal Disturbances”, “Approaching Zanzibar”, “One Shoe Off”, “Pride’s Crossing”, “Rembrandt’s Gift”, “Chasing Manet”, and translations of Eugène Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano” and “The Lesson”, in addition to a host of shorter plays. These works premiered at the Public Theater, the Kennedy Center, Second Stage, The Old Globe Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater, The Actors Theatre of Louisville the Atlantic Theater Company and Primary Stages. Among her many awards are an Obie for Distinguished playwriting, a Tony nomination for best Play, an Outer Circle Critics Award, a Rockefeller Grant, two N.E.A. Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Sidney Kingsley Award, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, two honorary degrees and the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theatre.

She is best known for her plays Painting Churches and Coastal Disturbances; the latter received a Tony Award nomination for best play in 1987. Howe also penned English translations of Eugene Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano" and "The Lesson" which was produced at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2004. The Atlantic Theater Company produced her play "Birth After Birth" as part of its 2006-2007 mainstage season at the Linda Gross Theater. She has received a Rockefeller grant (1984), a Guggenheim fellowship (1990), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1993), New York Drama Critic's Award for Best Play (1997—1998), Madge Evans and Sidney S. Kingsley Award (1998), William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater (2005), and honorary degrees from Whittier College (1997) and Bowdoin College (1998).

She has also taught master classes at NYU, UCLA, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon and she currently teaches playwrighting at Hunter College in New York City and has been a member of the council of The Dramatists Guild of America since 1990.

Her works can be read in numerous anthologies as well as in Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays by Tina Howe, and Approaching Zanzibar and Other Plays, published by Theatre Communications Group. Her translations of Ionesco's "The Bald Soprano" and "The Lesson", are published by Grove Press.

Painting Churches is being produced by St. Paul's Park Square Theatre in the Historic Hamm Building in downtown St. Paul Feb 26 - Mar 21, 2010

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tina Howe", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0