Rachel Atkins

Rachel Atkins is a Seattle-based playwright and teaching artist. She is the scriptwriter for Living Voices, the educational theatre partner of Theatreworks USA, with whom she has twelve different multi-media shows in ongoing national touring repertory, all focusing on issues of history and social justice, and seen by over 3 million audience members throughout the US and Canada.

Her play Black Like Us (Original Works Publishing) received the Theatre Puget Sound Gregory Award for Best New Play, two Seattle Times Footlight Awards, including Top World Premiere, and was a American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg New Play Award nominee. 

Other plays available through the New Play Exchange include Treadwell Gold (Perseverance Theatre, Alaska), Frankenstein’s Mary Shelley (Seattle Public Theater), and an updated revision of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (Temple University, Pennsylvania and Theater Schmeater, Seattle). Selected literary adaptations for Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre: Jane Austen’s Emma (also produced Harvard Radcliffe Summer Theater, Massachusetts & Vintage Theatre, Colorado), Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and a variety of children’s literature. Her play for young actors, Cam Jansen & the Mystery of the Missing Eagle, has been seen in Washington, Illinois, and Virginia. Short plays Brain Trust, This Is Not September 11, Baby Love, Conspiracy Theory, Zoetrope and Can You Hear the Mermaids Singing? have received multiple productions in New York, Missouri, Ohio, New Mexico and Washington. A 3-time Theatre Puget Sound Gregory Award nominee for Outstanding Playwright/New Play, her other work has been produced extensively throughout the Seattle area. 

A member of the Dramatists Guild, Rachel graduated from Dartmouth College and holds her Masters in Educational Theatre from New York University. She works as a master teaching artist for several teacher professional development programs, as well as A Contemporary Theatre’s Young Playwrights Program, through the ArtsWA Teaching Artist and Seattle Office of Arts & Culture’s Arts Partner rosters. Previously, she was the Scriptwriter/Dramaturge and Director of Education for Ardeo Theatre Project in France.