Neena Beber

Neena Beber is a playwright, screenwriter and lyricist born and raised in Miami, Florida. Her

plays include Jump/Cut, A Foreign Body, The Dew Point, Hard Feelings, Tomorrowland, A

Common Vision, The Brief but Exemplary Life of the Living Goddess (as told by herself) and

Misreadings, all published by Concord/Samuel French. Neena’s work has premiered at New

Georges, The Magic Theater, The Women’s Project, Woolly Mammoth, The Humana Festival;

she has developed work at the O’Neill Theater Center, The Lark, New York Theater Workshop

(Usual Suspect), The Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival, Williamstown Theater Festival,

Playwrights Horizons, and The Royal Court Theatre. In addition to an Obie grant, she is a

recipient of a Lilly Award, the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award, and Sloan and Amblin

Commissions, and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. A two-time Emmy

nominee, she has written extensively for film and television. She is currently writing lyrics for a

musical about Frida Kahlo (composer Jaime Lozano); book & lyrics for an adaptation of

Nabokov’s short story “The Vane Sisters” (composer Daniel Rein); book for the musical Rutka

(songs by Jocelyn Mackenzie & Jeremy Lloyd-Styles); book and co-lyricist for A Mother, a

radical adaptation of Brecht’s The Mother co-conceived with Jessica Hecht (composer/co-

lyricists Mustapha Kahn, Kenny Vaughan & Norman Burns); and co-book for Stuck in the 90s, a

musical using songs from the 1990s. She is the author of librettos for the operettas Ulysses,

Home and Kassandra (premiering at Rice University and Opera in the Heights); she and

composer Anthony Brandt are currently collaborating on their third operetta to complete the

cycle of updated Greek myths, this one a story of climate change , sacrifice and the wind,

Iphigenia. A member of the BMI Lehman Engel Advanced Musical Theatre Workshop, Neena

has contributed to New York Public Library at Lincoln Center’s Songbook Series: Broadway’s

Future and to Songs from an Immigrant by frequent collaborator Jaime Lozano. Other musical

collaborations include book writing for The 24-Hour Musicals and book & lyrics for Jade

Alaska, a YA musical commissioned by TheaterWorks USA (composer Benjamin Diskant).

Neena has written extensively for TV and film (two-time Emmy nominee). Neena holds a B.A.

magna cum laude from Harvard University where she specialized in Latin American literature

and an M.F.A from N.Y.U.'s Tisch School of the Arts, where she was a Paulette Goddard Fellow.

An alumna of New Dramatists and numerous theater development organizations, Neena sits on the Advisory Board of The Orchard Project and of the North Fork TV Festival.