Elizabeth Diggs is a playwright and professor of Dramatic Writing in the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at Tisch, NYU. She was born in Tulsa and went to college at Brown where she co-wrote the annual musical with her future partner Emily Arnold McCully. She acted in The Crucible and Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, and was a co-founder of Production Workshop, created to produce original student work.
After Brown, Liz went to graduate school in comparative literature at Columbia, which led to an irrelevant Ph.D., but to a life-changing involvement in the anti-war and feminist movements of 1968 and beyond. She joined SDS and the radical new-left New University Conference. In 1970, Liz was part of the NUC delegation to Cuba. In 1972, she was chosen to head one of the country’s first Women’s Studies Programs, at Jersey City State College. In Dramatic Writing at Tisch, she has taught some of the most gifted dramatists of the next generation.
Liz’s plays are both contemporary (Close Ties, Goodbye Freddy, American Beef) and reexaminations of history (Nightingale, Custer’s Luck, Glory Girls, Grant & Twain, and the musical, Mirette). She lives in NYC and in Columbia County, N.Y. Her daughter, Jenny Mackenzie, is a documentary filmmaker.
Liz is a longtime member of Ensemble Studio Theatre and EST’s Playwrights Unit. Her plays have been produced in New York at EST and the Vineyard, and at dozens of theatres across the country and around the world.
For television, she wrote for the groundbreaking drama, St. Elsewhere.
Her many awards include Guggenheim, NEA and Kennedy Center grants, runner-up for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Los Angeles DramaLogue award for playwriting. She was invited twice to the Sundance Playwrights Institute to work on the musical, Mirette
