Tina Esper
focuses on the silenced—those whose rightful place in society is scrutinized and challenged.
Her plays reimagine the lives of older women as acts of resistance. Women shaped by years of caretaking, compromise and deferred ambition.
Women socialized to shrink.
She follows them to the moment where they refuse invisibility.
Her work inhabits the charged space between erasure and revolt, insisting that reinvention is not the privilege of youth, but the hard-fought right of experience.
A first-generation American playwright of Lebanese-Brazilian and Portuguese descent, Tina’s plays emerge from an intimate understanding of displacement and negotiated identity. She writes about people pushed to the margins— the aging, the immigrant, the underrepresented—using humor, restraint and surrealism to test the structures that authorize belonging.
Tina's play, Neighbor Jane was the co-recipient of the 2023 National Partners of the American Theatre’s Julie Jensen Playwriting Award. Neighbor Jane was also selected for the 2022 Great Plains Theatre Conference and was developed at the Sewanee Writers Conference 2021. She's currently working on The Universe of Jane in Three Books: Neighbor Jane, State of Maine and Soft Star.
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In 2023, Tina attended the New Harmony Project as well as the Sewanee Writers Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar.
WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING
Soft Star was produced by Boston Playwrights Theatre November 2024. Boston's own Sleepless Critic praised this production, read here.
Neighbor Jane was part of The Provincetown Theater B Plot Reading Series April 2025.
Tina graduated from Boston University's three-year MFA Playwriting program May 2025 with eight full-length plays. Get ready for some exciting work to hit the new play circuit!
TIGHT, a full-length comedy, was selected for the Studio@620's inaugural NuWorks Play Development program where it had a week of rehearsals followed by a staged reading August 2025. TIGHT was also a semifinalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival 2025.
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IN THE NEWS
TIGHT made a splash in Florida, garnering press from several news outlets. Read some of that here.
Tina was featured in American Theatre Magazine. Read more about her experience at the Great Plains Theatre Conference 2022 here.
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AWARDS
Neighbor Jane won the Kennedy Center's Julie Jensen Playwriting Award in 2023. Fireflies was a 2021 Woodward/Newman Drama Award Finalist as well as a 2020 O’Neill Semifinalist, a 2021 Garry Marshall New Works Festival Semifinalist and a 2021 Cimientos Semifinalist.
Tina has taught creative writing and playwriting at Boston University.
She lives in Montclair, New Jersey.