John Kuntz

John Kuntz joined Boston Conservatory in 2005 and is an award-winning playwright, actor, director, and solo performer. As an actor, he has worked with the Huntington Theatre Company, the ART, Speakeasy Stage Company, the Lyric Stage, Central Square Theatre, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, Boston Playwrights, the New Rep, and many others. Recent acting credits include Macbeth, The Tempest, and Much Ado About Nothing with Commonwealth Shakespeare Company; People, Places, and Things and The Prom with Speakeasy Stage Company; and Frankenstein at Central Square Theatre. He is the author of over 15 full-length plays, including Necessary Monsters, The Hotel Nepenthe, The Salt Girl, After School Special, Sing Me to Sleep, Jump/Rope, Jasper Lake, and The Annotated History of the American Muskrat. He is the recipient of five Elliot Norton Awards, two IRNE Awards, a New York International Fringe Festival Award, the Michael Kanin and Paula Vogel Playwrighting awards, a 2015 MCC Fellowship Award in Dramatic Writing, and was an inaugural Playwrighting Fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company.

He is currently a lecturer in theater, dance, and media at Harvard University and is an associate professor of theater at Boston Conservatory at Berklee. He has directed and curated the world premieres of several original devised works at the Conservatory, including Graceland, Cosmic Certainty, a soft murder, Mercy Hospital, The Museum of Useless Desire, Capsule #613, Giovanni’s Room (an adaptation of the novel by James Baldwin), Moist, The Murder Box, and All My Pretty Ones, as well as the first incarnations of his plays The Hotel Nepenthe and Necessary Monsters. He also has directed Jean Genets’s The Balcony and Peter Barnes’s Red Noses for the Conservatory mainstage.  

Professional Awards and Recognitions

• MCC Fellowship Award in Dramatic Writing (2015)
• IRNE Award (2003, 2011)
• Elliot Norton Award (1999, 2010, 2011)
• Michael Kanin National Playwriting Award (2005)
• Paula Vogel National Playwriting Award (2005)
• New York International Fringe Festival Award (2002)

Recent Engagements

• Bootycandy (SpeakEasy Stage Company, 2016)—Clint, Roy, etc.
• The Annotated History of the American Muskrat (Ice Factory, New York City, 2016)—Playwright
• Othello (Actors' Shakespeare Project, 2015)—Iago
• Necessary Monsters (Speakeasy Stage Company, 2015)—Playwright, performer
• God's Ear (Actors' Shakespeare Project, 2015)—Flight Attendant, GI Joe