Ariel Mitchell

Ariel Mitchell hails from a small island in the Chesapeake Bay. She began her writing career in her sophomore year of high school with Mask Club (book, lyrics, and some music), a musical about high school students choosing and changing their identities like masks. She earned her BA in Playwriting (Music minor) April 2013 from Brigham Young University and her MFA in Musical Theatre Writing in May 2015 from New York University. She has written several plays, including Give Me Moonlight, a play inspired by Scotty's Castle in Death Valley, and A Second Birth, a play about an Afghan girl who was raised as a boy, for which she was awarded the KCACTF Harold and Mimi Steinberg 2013 National Student Playwriting Award, third place for the 2013 David Mark Cohen Award, and the 2011 Vera Hinckley Mayhew Award. Her most recent work, MORMONish (book and lyrics), a semi-autobiographical musical dramedy, tells the story of a half-Mormon, half-Jewish girl searching for where she fits in a family where everyone believes something different.

As well as writing for stage, TV and screen, she has also dramaturged many productions, including The Completely Fictional – Utterly True – Strange Final Tale of Edgar Allan Poe at Centerstage in Baltimore, Steel Magnolias at the Echo Theatre in Provo, Utah, What the Bellhop Saw at the Utah Repertory Theater in Murray, Utah, and Selections from Gone Missing and The Cleverest Thief, a devised piece, at BYU.