Elissa Adams is the Director of New Play Development at Children's Theatre Company. Since 1998, she has overseen the commissioning and development of more than 35 new plays produced at CTC, by playwrights including Kia Corthron, Nilo Cruz, Lisa D'Amour, Melissa James Gibson, Carlyle Brown, Jeffrey Hatcher, Naomi Iizuka, Will Power, Victoria Stewart and performance ensembles including New Paradise Laboratories and the Civilians. She is the co-editor of Fierce and True: Plays for Teen Audiences and Face of America: Plays for Young People - both published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Prior to her position at CTC, she served as Director of Playwright Services at The Playwrights' Center and Literary Manager at La Jolla Playhouse. She is a frequent guest dramaturg at the Sundance Theatre Lab and has served on numerous panels for TCG. Elissa teaches a course in theatrical process at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, serves on the boards of Open Eye Figure Theatre and TYA/USA and was a 2007 recipient of a McKnight Foundation Theatre Artist Fellowship. She traveled to Tanzania in 2008 as a teaching artist with the International Theatre and Literacy Project. She holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from UC San Diego.
