An exploration of science through narrative and storytelling

The Alan Kanzer Writer-in-Residence program engages writers and scientists at the intersection of narrative and neuroscience. The residency gives one writer per year time and support for creative pursuit, forges formal and informal interactions with scientists, and promotes engagement across the Institute and the surrounding community. By the end of the residency, the writer, the scientists, and members of the wider community benefit from access to new knowledge and perspectives from these cross-disciplinary activities.

About Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl is an award-winning American playwright, author, essayist, and professor. Her plays include The Oldest Boy, Dear Elizabeth, Stage Kiss, In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2010); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2005; Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004); Passion Play (Pen American Award, Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play); Melancholy Play; Demeter in the City (nine NAACP Image Award nominations); Scenes From Court Life; How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday; Eurydice; Orlando; and Late: a cowboy song. Her plays have been produced on Broadway and across the country as well as internationally, and translated into fourteen languages. Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her M.F.A. from Brown University, where she studied with Paula Vogel. She is the recipient of a Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a PEN Center Award for mid-career playwrights, a Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, and a Lilly award. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. She teaches at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Find out more at sarahruhlplaywright.com

Sarah Ruhl's residency is hosted by Daphna Shohamy, PhD, Kavli Professor of Brain Science, PI and Co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science, and CEO and director of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute. 

This program is made possible with the generous support of Alan Kanzer. Columbia University's School of the Arts and Zuckerman Institute are grateful to Mr. Kanzer for his generosity and commitment to fostering interactions between the arts and neuroscience. The previous, inaugural Alan Kanzer Writer-in-Residence was best-selling author Nicole Krauss (To Be a Man, Forest Dark, The History of Love), who delved deep into the scientific underpinnings of mind, memory and behavior during her 2020-21 residency.