Ellen McLaughlin is an award-winning playwright and actor. Her plays include Tongue of a Bird, A Narrow Bed, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Trojan Women, Infinity’s House, Helen, The Persians, Oedipus, Ajax in Iraq, Kissing the Floor, Septimus and Clarissa, Pericles and Penelope. Her work has been performed in New York Off-Broadway and regionally as well as overseas. Producers include The Public Theater, National Actors’ Theater, Classic Stage Co., New York Theater Workshop, The Guthrie, The Intiman, The Mark Taper Forum, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors’ Theater of Louisville, and The Almeida Theater in London. Among her honors are the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. Her Trojan Women was nominated for a 2017 Drama Desk Award for Best Adaptation.

She has taught playwrighting at Barnard College since 1995. Other teaching posts include Princeton University and Yale School of Drama.

As an actor, she is most well known for having originated the part of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, appearing in all workshops and productions of the play through its Broadway original run.