| Tom Dunn was born in Minnesota and lived there most of his first thirty years. He attended the University of Minnesota and majored in pre-med and theatre. Before he got to medical school playwrights he met at the University invited him to be the founding director of The Playwrights’ Center—now the country’s largest service organization for playwrights. After overseeing the Center grow from a tiny company to one of the Twin Cities most important theatre organizations Tom left for NYC where he took over the floundering New Dramatists—the oldest service organization for playwrights in the country. During his eight years as Director of New Dramatists the company expanded from being a NYC company of playwrights to being a national company and the finances and the historical building were gotten into shape and remodeled respectively. Tom left NYC to co-found an equity theatre--Theatre of the First Amendment and a performing arts department at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He also served as a consultant and panelist for the NEA for two decades and saw some forty plays and short stories he wrote produced and/or published and co-wrote books on playwriting, acting and fund-raising—The Playwrights’ Handbook (Viking), Scenes and Monologues of the New American Theatre(NAL), and How To Shake the New Money Tree (Plume). |
