About

I try to write comedies but everyone always ends up crying.

Bio:
Jacob Marx Rice is a playwright and screenwriter based in Queens, New York. His plays have been produced in over fifteen cities across three continents, won the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, been nominated for four Off West End Awards, and been published by Bloomsbury/Methuen.

Jacob’s plays have been produced and developed at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, The New Ohio, The Flea Theater, Atlantic Theatre Stage 2, and others. His play Chemistry recently opened at the Olivier-nominated Finborough Theatre, where The Guardian hailed it as “remarkable for its tender compassion” and The Stage called it a “Moving, insightful love story… Rice has written a love story that treats heavy, complex subjects with confidence and compassion.” Jacob’s film adaptation of the play was a semifinalist for the Nicholl Fellowship from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and is currently in development with the production company Anonymous Content. Jacob has been named a Playwright Observer at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

As a screenwriter, Jacob has developed films with major production companies, including Imagine Entertainment and Anonymous Content, as well as directors Jaco van Dormael, Michael Tyburski, Henry Scholfield, and Pierre Morrel. Jacob has won the Sloan Science Screenwriting Award, a Sloan Science Playwriting Commission, the Faculty Award from NYU Tisch Film School. He also wrote the screenplay for See Through, a short film about a Deaf couple featuring Tony-nominated actor Lauren Ridloff (The Sound of Metal, Marvel’s Eternals), which has been featured at the Austin Film Festival, the Cannes’ Festival’s Short Film Corner, and film festivals across the United States.

Jacob studied Theater and Astrophysics at Columbia University and Dramatic Writing at NYU. He has been mentored by Suzan-Lori Parks, Ellen McLaughlin, James Shapiro and Oskar Eustis, who hired him as the Directing Observer on the Public Theater’s new production of A Bright Room Called Day. In addition to his writing, Jacob has worked as a dramaturg on numerous projects and specializes in building rigorous structures that enable complex play.