Bio · CV · Highlights
Professional Profile
Professional Profile
As an award-winning playwright, educator, producer, and author, my career spans professional writing, publications, university teaching, arts administration, and creative collaboration. My nationally and internationally produced work, along with more than fifteen years of teaching creative writing, theatre, and cinema, continues to inspire both my own creative work and my commitment to helping others discover their voices.
Biography
Charlene A. Donaghy is an award-winning educator, producer, and playwright whose work has been produced and recognized across the United States and internationally, including Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. Her play collection Bones of Home and Other Plays and craft book One Bold Voice: Writing Compelling Monologues are published by Hansen Publishing Group. Her work has also appeared in Best American Short Plays, She Persisted: One Hundred Monologues, Best 10-Minute Plays, Estrogenius, and other publications. Charlene teaches playwriting, screenwriting, and fiction in the University of Nebraska Omaha’s MFA in Creative Writing and theatre and cinema in UNO’s Department of Theatre. She is Founder and Festival Director of the Goshen Players Roundabout Theatre Festival, serves on the Advisory Committee of Connecticut Theatre Women, and previously served as Founder and Festival Director of the Warner International Playwrights Festival and as Producing Director of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. She is a Founding Member of Boston’s Proscenium Playwrights and a member of The 9th Floor Writers & Actors Collaborative, The Playwrights Center, Honor Roll!, and The Dramatists Guild of America, where she served as the inaugural Connecticut/Western New England Regional Representative.
Recognition
- Merit for Invaluable Contribution of Culture and Theatrical Art Internationally from the Samara Regional Assembly
- UNO Part-Time Faculty of the Year Award
- Omaha Arts & Entertainment Awards Nominee
- Best Connecticut Playwright Nominations
Produced In
Alabama, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington DC and Internationally in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and worldwide.
Career Highlights
University of Nebraska Omaha - Professor
In 2025, I was honored to receive the College of Communication, Fine Arts and Media’s Part-Time Faculty of the Year Award at the University of Nebraska Omaha, where I have taught since 2011. I originally came to UNO to consult on the creation of the Stage and Screen track in the MFA in Creative Writing, never imagining how profoundly UNO would become part of my own story. Since then, I have taught playwriting, screenwriting, fiction, theatre, and cinema; created and coordinated the MFA Graduate Reading Director Program; organized staged readings; and developed internships and professional opportunities connecting students with national and international theatre artists. UNO Theatre also workshop-produced my full-length 4 a.m. Friends for its New Ways, New Works celebration.
Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival - Producing Director
From 2007 to 2021, I served as Producing Director of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, bringing extraordinary theatre and artists from around the world to Provincetown. I oversaw the production of an ambitious international program, working with companies from New Zealand, Japan, Portugal, Italy, South Africa, Russia, Ghana, and beyond. Among our most ambitious projects was bringing the National Theatre of Ghana to the United States for a national tour. At the heart of my work was bringing people together. As part of a three-person executive team, I collaborated with a dedicated Board of Directors, hundreds of staff and theatre professionals, visiting artists, venues, and the Provincetown community to transform ambitious ideas into live theatre. For my international cultural work, I received the Samara Regional Assembly’s Merit for Invaluable Contribution of Culture and Theatrical Art Internationally. I continued consulting with the Festival through 2023.
Warner International Playwrights Festival - Festival Director
The Warner International Playwrights Festival began with wonderfully perfect timing. I approached the Warner Theatre with an idea for an international festival devoted to one-act plays just as the theatre was exploring the creation of a play festival of its own. Our ideas came together, and I became Festival Director, working alongside a phenomenal Festival Producer and a welcoming, talented community of theatre artists. Over thirteen years, we produced more than 160 plays, bringing playwrights, directors, actors, designers, technicians, and audiences together around new and previously produced work. The Festival welcomed writers from across the United States and around the world while creating opportunities for regional artists to bring those stories fully to life onstage. It became a remarkable intersection of international voices, local artistry, and collaborative theatre-making.
The Quadroon and the Dove
Inspired by a New Orleans ghost story and written largely in my French Quarter courtyard in the wee hours of the morning, The Quadroon and the Dove became one of the most significant professional journeys of my playwriting career. Rich in historical detail, layered characters, and unexpected revelations, the full-length play was optioned for Broadway, bringing me into collaboration with Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning theatre artists, an internationally renowned casting director, and extraordinary actors. Working at this level of professional theatre challenged and expanded my understanding of dramatic storytelling, character development, and theatrical possibility. The extraordinary artists, rigorous development, and creative discoveries of that journey profoundly influenced my work as a playwright and theatre-maker.
One Bold Voice: Writing Compelling Monologues
One Bold Voice: Writing Compelling Monologues grew from a generative lecture I first developed for MFA writers in 2011. Over the years, I continued teaching and refining my approach to monologue writing, exploring how writers can create distinctive voices and compelling stories for the stage and page. When national and international professors, theatre artists, and writers began asking about the lecture, I shared my materials, and the idea for a book began to take shape. Published by Hansen Publishing Group, One Bold Voice brings that evolving method to a wider community of writers and features contemporary monologues from eighteen fellow playwrights whose work illuminates the craft in action. Perhaps most meaningful to me, the journey continues: I still teach the generative lecture that started it all, now enriched by everything I learned while writing the book.
4 a.m. Friends
4 a.m. Friends is the play I never imagined writing. What began as two short plays about three friends grew into a full-length spanning six decades, and a work that has connected with theatre makers and audiences across the country. I wrote with both my playwright and producer hats on: three actors, modular design, and minimal costume changes create a production that is theatrically rich while intentionally streamlined. Within that framework, distinctive characters, humor and heartbreak, and journeys through six decades have carried Becca, Tammy, and Kim to productions and readings from Texas to Nebraska, Maryland, Kansas, and beyond. Across those productions, audiences have laughed, cried, and, perhaps most importantly, recognized their own 4 a.m. Friends in these three women.
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