Jaclyn Villano has been writing plays since she was old enough to figure out how to cut up her father's dress socks and use them as hand puppets. At seven, she was the "adorable" one who handed out scripts and forced cousins to perform at holiday dinners. By twelve, she was the "annoying" one who should "give the plays a rest already," and by twenty, she was mocked relentlessly with videos of her childhood "productions." Jaclyn has been attempting to sell her scripts for nearly as long, as evinced by the "Grandma's Story—$.50 a Tale" family reunion debacle, circa 1984.
Two dozen years later, Jaclyn is still enthralled by the world of theatre and the idea of selling her words for pennies. A college playwriting class cemented her desire to pursue playwriting professionally. Out of that class was born No Worse for the Wear, Jaclyn's first staged play, which was workshopped at The University of Notre Dame's New Playwrights' Workshop in January 2000. No Worse was later selected to be part of Curtain Players Playwrights Festival in Columbus, Ohio, as well as the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska, and also helped secure Jaclyn a creative writing scholarship from Boston University.
Jaclyn took a turn as the Manager of Children's Events and Special Events for the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival, a New York based non-profit summer theatre. There, her full-length show Breathing Room received a professional staged reading by the HSF acting troupe. A subsequent show, The Constitution of Caitlin Dempsey, was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest 76th Annual Writing Competition. One of her newest plays, Rockabye Bullet, was a recent semifinalist in the Theatre Oxford's 10 Minute Play Contest.
In addition to being a playwright, Jaclyn is co-author of London Summer Survival Guide, a students' guide to living and studying abroad. Her short story "Angels at the Grotto" was published in Grotto Stories, a compilation of short stories about The University of Notre Dame, her alma mater. Jaclyn holds both a Bachelor of Arts and a Juris Doctorate from Notre Dame, and has been a contributor to Notre Dame Magazine. She was the Editor-in-Chief of the Student Bar Association Newsletter for the law school.
Fueled by a love of travel and a nomadic tendency, Jaclyn has lived in New York, Texas, Indiana, London, Boston, Washington D.C., and a few places in between. Currently, she resides in Portland, Maine, where she works as a law clerk.
If you need a hi-res copy of Jaclyn's headshot, please contact us. Headshot by Dale Bush Photography.
Read more about the other resident playwrights of Theatre Daedalus: