Cary Simowitz (He/Him/His) is a thirty-one-year-old playwright and lawyer hailing from Coral Springs, Florida, currently serving as the Dramatists Guild Regional Ambassador for St. Louis. He recently graduated from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television with his Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting. He is the author of five full-length plays, three one acts, and several ten minute pieces, in addition to multiple works of poetry and short fiction. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English and Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2013. Following undergraduate school, he received his Juris Doctor from Washington University School of Law in 2016, and is licensed to practice law in Missouri and New York.
Cary’s plays have collectively garnered him modest recognition in over two-dozen competitions across the country. His play, Djarum Vanilla, was developed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC in August of 2018 as part of their MFA New Play Festival. It went on to receive the Kennedy Center’s 2019 Rosa Parks Award for “Distinguished Achievement,” and was developed at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta Georgia as a 2019-2020 Alliance/Kendeda finalist play. It was later incorporated into the middle school English literature curriculum at the KIPP School in the Bronx. His UCLA thesis play, A Wolf’s Mother, was produced at UCLA as part of its 2019 MFA New Play Festival, and was subsequently given a workshop production at the Garage Theater in Long Beach, California, as a winner of Panndora Production’s 12th Annual New Works Festival. His most recent project, All the Oxytocin in Your Fingertips, which explores Deaf Culture in American society, was a finalist in the 2019 Tennessee Williams/ New Orleans Literary Festival. It achieved finalist status in the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s 2020 and 2021 National Playwrights Conference, and was the Grand Prize winning play at the 2021 FutureFest New Play Festival.