Bio

Patricia Cotter’s (she/her) awards include The American Academy of Arts Letters, the Richard Rodgers Award, the Daytime Emmy Award, and the Writers Guild of America Award. Current projects include a commissioned musical theatre project, “The Bridge Project,” with composers The Kilbanes that is slated for a 2024 workshop at The Marin Theater Company. She is writing the book for the musical Heavyhead, a modern retelling of the Medusa myth, which was commissioned for its first public reading at the Jersey City Theater Center in 2023 and was a semifinalist for the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's 2024 National Music Theater Conference. Her queer history comedy The Daughters (The Kilroys Honorable Mention) was included in the Mondays at 3 reading series at  New York Theatre Workshop and had its West Coast premiere at San Francisco Playhouse in 2019. Her two-person comedy I’ll Give You Something to Cry About was presented in 2020 as part of Centenary Stage Company’s Women Playwrights Series. Other plays include 1980 (Or Why I’m Voting For John Anderson) at Chicago’s Jackalope Theatre, a 2017 Jeff Awards nominee for Best New Play; The Surrogate, winner of the 2016 Susan Glaspell Award, finalist at the 2016 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, produced at Centenary Stage Company, NJ, in 2017; Rules of Comedy, produced in the 2015 Humana Festival of Ten-Minute Plays; The Stars Look Very Different Today, produced as part of TheatreWorks 17th Annual New Works Festival in 2018. Musicals (librettist/ adaptations) include Rocket Science: A Musical, which received readings at Playwrights Horizons in New York (directed by Kathleen Marshall) and was produced at The Village Theatre, Seattle; The Break-Up Notebook: A Musical (based on her play) at The Vineyard Theatre in New York. She was asked by Disney Theatricals and MTI to write Mulan, Jr. (based on the Disney film Mulan), which is produced and performed nationally. She is an alumnus of The Bay Area Playwright Foundation’s Resident Playwrights program. In addition to writing for the stage, Patricia has written for Audible, Twentieth Century Fox Television, Disney Theatrical, and Comedy Central.