Steve Cosson

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Steve Cosson is a director, writer and Artistic Director of The Civilians theater company in New York, where he has originated and developed numerous original works in collaboration with some of the leading theater artists of the country. He’s developed original shows for TBS and ITV Entertainment, is the creator and host of the documentary musical podcast Let Me Ascertain You, and with The Civilians was the first theater company to be Artist-in-Residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Select theater credits include the New York premiere of Whisper House (Duncan Sheik/Kyle Jarrow) (postponed due to COVID); world premiere of Paul Swan is Dead and Gone by Claire Kiechel; the Encores! Off-Center revival of Gone Missing (bookwriter); Jill Sobule’s musical Times Square, bookwriter and director of The Abominables at Children’s Theater Company, writer and director of The Undertaking at BAM Next Wave, US tour, Theatre de la Ville, Paris; director of José Rivera’s Another Word for Beauty, world premiere at the Goodman Theatre; writer/director, Rimbaud in New York at BAM; director of Michael Friedman and Bess Wohl’s musical Pretty Filthy; and the Off Broadway revival of The Belle of Amherst starring Joely Richardson.

Other world premieres include The Great Immensity (writer/director) at The Public Theater and Kansas City Rep; Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play at Playwrights Horizons and Woolly Mammoth, which was included in Top 10 lists in The New York Times, Time Out, The New Yorker, Vogue, and best production of the season in The Washington Post; writer/director of In the Footprint; This Beautiful City at Vineyard, Kirk Douglas Theatre, Humana Festival; (I am) Nobody’s Lunch in New York, Edinburgh Fringe First Award, and Soho Theatre, London; Gone Missing with several US and UK productions and a one-year run Off Broadway at Barrow Street; and Paris Commune at Public Theater, BAM Next Wave, La Jolla Playhouse.

Other directing highlights include Anne Washburn’s A Devil at Noon (Humana Festival); Ethel’s Documerica (BAM Next Wave); Dael Orlandersmith’s Stoop Stories; Spring Awakening (Olney Theatre); Bus Stop (Kansas City Rep); and the US premiere of Attempts on Her Life (Soho Rep), among many others.

He was a speaker at the 2012 TED Conference. He has participated in the Sundance Theater Lab several times and was a MacDowell Fellow and Fulbright Scholar in Colombia.

His plays are published by Dramatists Play Service, Smith & Kraus, Oberon Books and Playscripts, Inc.