Maggie-Kate Coleman

she/her

Artistic Director, Polyphone Festival

Maggie-Kate (MK) Coleman is a playwright, lyricist, librettist, curator, educator and advocate for new work.

She is a 2017 recipient of the Jonathan Larson Grant and the Saw Island Recording Grant with collaborator Erato A. Kremmyda. Their musical MARIE IN TOMORROW LAND, created in collaboration with Sam Pinkleton, was developed at Polyphone in 2019 (under founding Artistic Director César Alvarez) and received the 2023 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater. Her select work with Kremmyda includes Inside, Outside, Upside Down (commission, Company of Fools); Hotel Méditeranée (Wild Project); and We Will Not Be Silent (concert commission, New York Musical Theatre Festival). Other selected works include POP!, with composer Anna K. Jacobs (Yale Repertory, Connecticut Critics Circle Award for Best Musical 2009 / Studio Theatre, seven Helen Hayes nominations / City Theatre, et. al.) and The Gift of the Magi, with bookwriter Jeffrey Hatcher and composer Andrew Cooke (commission, Arkansas Repertory). MK is a 2015 MacDowell Fellow, and her work has been developed at Mercury Store, the Orchard Project, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Space on Ryder Farm, Ars Nova, The Civilians R&D Group, The American Music Theatre Project, Catwalk Art Residency, and Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat. MK is a reader/adjudicator for the Jonathan Larson Grant, the Johnny Mercer Foundation Songwriters Project, and the American Music Theatre Project at Northwestern University, among other national theater organizations and residency programs.  

MK earned an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and a BA from Ithaca College, New York.