Mary Gallagher is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, actress, director and teacher.  Many of her plays are published and have been produced in New York City, throughout the U.S. and in many other countries. Three of her screenplays have been produced as award-winning films.  She has received many fellowships and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockerfeller Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Writers Guild Award, and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For six years, she was artistic director of Gypsy, a theatre company in the Hudson Valley, New York, which collaborated with many artists to create site-specific mask-and-puppet music-theatre with texts and lyrics by Gallagher.  These pieces included Premanjali and the 7 Geese Brothers, Ama and The Scottish Play.  In 1996-97, she directed the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, and she taught playwriting and screenwriting at New York University/Tisch School of the Arts from 2001 to 2010.  She is a member of Actors & Writers, a theater company in the Hudson Valley, and the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City.  She is an alumna of New Dramatists, where she developed many of her plays and created and moderated the series, “You Can Make a Life: Conversations with Playwrights” from 1994 to 2001.