Sarah Ruhl: A Biography

Sarah Ruhl was born in Wilmette, IL in 1974. Theatre was a part of her life from a young age--her mother worked as an actress at the Piven Theatre Workshop--but she finally went to Brown University with the intention of studying poetry. However, in her sophomore year she took Paula Vogel's playwriting class:

"[Ruhl was a] sophomore, but I thought at first she was a senior: she was quiet and serious, but so obviously possessed a mind that came at aesthetics from a unique angle. I assigned an exercise: to write a short play with a dog as protagonist. Sarah Ruhl wrote of her father’s death from that unique angle: a dog is waiting by the door, waiting for the family to come home, unaware that the family is at his master’s funeral, unaware of the concept of death.

And, oh yes, the play was written with Kabuki stage techniques, in gorgeous, emotionally vivid language. I sat with this short play in my lap in my study, and sobbed. I interrupted my then partner, now wife, Anne Sterling, at her computer in her study, and read it to her, and the two of us shared that playworld, and the recognition of who this young woman could become: Sarah Ruhl." (via BOMB)

After getting her MFA in 2001, her play Late: A Cowboy Song premiered at the Clubbed Thumb in New York City two years later, but it wasn't until 2004 and her play The Clean House premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2005 that Ruhl gained widespread recognition. It also garnered her a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. 

The next year she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant," which awarded her $500,000 dollars over the next 5 years to work on her plays. 

Ruhl's other awards include:

Pen Award 

NAACP Image Award nomination
Fourth Freedom Forum Award
Helen Merrill Award
Whiting Writers' Award

Sarah Ruhl is also a member of The New Dramatists.