About Claire
Claire Willett is a playwright, grantwriter, blogger, and Catholic youth minister from Portland, Oregon. Her most recent play, How the Light Gets In, was produced as a staged reading in Portland’s 2010 Fertile Ground Festival of New Work, and was selected as a featured festival project by critics and local media. Portland theatre blogger, editor and literary director Mead Hunter called it “a sassy psychological breakthrough story that deftly avoided the usual traps of sentiment and sententiae, and showed us that Claire is very much a writer to watch.”
Willett’s play Upon Waking was produced in the 2009 Fertile Ground Festival. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Theatre from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where her first play Requiem: God Breathing took 3rd Prize in the 2002 One Act Play Contest. Her second play, The Mysterious Mr. Azul was produced as her senior thesis project during the 2003 Annual Undergraduate Conference. Willett is also an accomplished director, specializing in Shakespeare, and teaches an annual course for 8th graders on Macbeth at All Saints Catholic School in Northeast Portland. A graduate of the Paul A. Kaplan Theatre Management Program at Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, she worked in PR and development for three years at Artists Repertory Theatre, and as a development consultant for many other arts organizations like the Portland Area Theatre Alliance, Wordstock, Theatre Vertigo, hand2mouth, and the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center. She is currently the Grants Manager for Oregon Ballet Theatre.
Read playwright Adam Szymkowicz’s interview with her here.
