Annie Baker (b. 1981) is an American screenwriter and playwright. She grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing from New York University in 2003, and her Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting from Brooklyn College in 2009.
She won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play The Flick, about exploited workers at a dying cinema. Other plays include Circle Mirror Transformation (2009), which won an OBIE Award for Best New American Play, John (2015), which was nominated for the 2016 Lucille Lortel Award and 2016 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, and Infinite Life (2023).
Baker is known for hyper-Naturalist scripts that dramatize mundane moments of life and work. Her scripts capture everyday conversations and communication failures. As a theatre artist, she explores the value of making art in a capitalistic society. She received a 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for “mining the minutiae of how we speak, act, and relate to one another and the absurdity and tragedy that result from the limitations of language.” Critic Vikram Murthi praises her ability to “carefully orchestrate conversations built around unrefined speech, making superficially mundane and aimless chitchat of paramount importance to her characters’ inner lives."
Although primarily known as a New York-based playwright, Baker also works in Hollywood. Her MFA thesis project was a screenplay, and she supported herself working in film and television from 2007 to 2010. She has contributed as a writer to the television comedy series I Love Dick, released on Amazon Prime (2016-2017). She is the writer, director, and producer of the feature film Janet Planet (2023). She is currently adapting Erin Morgenstern’s novel The Night Circus for Lions Gate Films.
She won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play The Flick, about exploited workers at a dying cinema. Other plays include Circle Mirror Transformation (2009), which won an OBIE Award for Best New American Play, John (2015), which was nominated for the 2016 Lucille Lortel Award and 2016 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, and Infinite Life (2023).
Baker is known for hyper-Naturalist scripts that dramatize mundane moments of life and work. Her scripts capture everyday conversations and communication failures. As a theatre artist, she explores the value of making art in a capitalistic society. She received a 2017 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for “mining the minutiae of how we speak, act, and relate to one another and the absurdity and tragedy that result from the limitations of language.” Critic Vikram Murthi praises her ability to “carefully orchestrate conversations built around unrefined speech, making superficially mundane and aimless chitchat of paramount importance to her characters’ inner lives."
Although primarily known as a New York-based playwright, Baker also works in Hollywood. Her MFA thesis project was a screenplay, and she supported herself working in film and television from 2007 to 2010. She has contributed as a writer to the television comedy series I Love Dick, released on Amazon Prime (2016-2017). She is the writer, director, and producer of the feature film Janet Planet (2023). She is currently adapting Erin Morgenstern’s novel The Night Circus for Lions Gate Films.
"Let's make something wild and crazy but so fucking truthful that it gives everyone a new sense of empathy and commonality.
We can change the world."
—Annie Baker, The Antipodes
We can change the world."
—Annie Baker, The Antipodes