Kari Barclay is a playwright, theater director, and scholar serving as Associate Professor of Theater at Oberlin College.
They make work that deepens audiences’ sense of time and sparks curiosity about sexuality and gender. Recent projects include a solo show about intimacy and crossword puzzles, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac based on a seventh-century genderqueer poet, and a meditation on wildfire and queer history in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kari’s directing and playwriting have been seen at Ars Nova, Cleveland Public Theater, Richmond Triangle Players, and convergence-continuum, among other theaters. They are a 2026 Dramatists Guild Foundation National Fellow, a 2026 Ohio Arts Council Individual in Excellence awardee, and the winner of the inaugural So.Queer Playwriting Contest. As a scholar, they have written about theater, sexuality, and labor for academic journals. Their book, Directing Desire, examines the rise of consent-based approaches to staging sex in contemporary theater and is out now from Palgrave Macmillan. PhD: Stanford University 2021. kari-barclay.com
