Dianne Nora

Dianne Nora is a playwright, dramaturg, and comedy writer who lives and works in Chicago and New York, and previously in Dublin, Ireland. She’s a headline and features contributor at The Onion, America’s Finest News Source. Her play for young audiences, Journey Around My Bedroom, premiered at The New Ohio Theatre in 2020, and was recommended as a Top 5 Weekend Pick in The New York Times, America’s Second Finest News Source. An abbreviated version of her play Monica: This Play is Not About Monica Lewinsky premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, where it was hailed as the "Best of the Fringe" by The Spectator. Di was a 2018-2019 member of Goodman Theatre’s Playwrights Unit, where she was commissioned to write a new play about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A staged reading of this play was directed by Marti Lyons in July 2019, and included original music by Emily Gardner Xu Hall, recipient of a 2019 Jonathan Larson Grant. After completing her MFA at Columbia University School of the Arts, Dianne assisted her mentor Tracy Letts on the world premieres of his plays Mary Page Marlowe, Linda Vista, and The Minutes, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Di's jokes have also appeared in Funny or Die and The Hard Times, where she was previously the Head Writer for Breaking News. She is also a writer on Scott Dikkers' (founder of The Onion's) parody book Welcome to the Future Which is Mine by (Not) Elon Musk, available everywhere from Grand Central Publishing, with an audiobook recorded by comedian James Adomian. Di's plays have been developed at Goodman Theatre, New Ohio Theatre, Capital Stage, Pipeline Theatre at Walkerspace, the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Un-American Blackbox, Via Brooklyn, Normal Ave Theatre, and the Irish Film Institute. She's a graduate of NYU, Trinity College Dublin, and Columbia University School of the Arts, and she also studied at Atlantic Acting School and the Second City Training Center. You can find her plays on the New Play Exchange at the link above!