Calamity West is an award-winning playwright and educator whose work has been developed, produced, and presented by leading institutions including The Goodman Theatre, Primary Stages, The Public, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Roundabout Underground, the Lucille Lortel Theatre, the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, and Jackalope Theatre Company - to name a few.

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From 2022 to 2026, West is in residence at Primary Stages in New York as a member of the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group. During this residency, she has written FEAST! and Sgt. Hank Cole’s Drama Club of Algona, both of which have received multiple staged readings and workshops in New York and Chicago. She will conclude her Primary Stages residency with her play Parallax (2026), a new work examining community, power, and the fragile social order of homeowners associations.

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West’s body of work spans nearly fifteen years of productions, commissions, and long-term development processes. Selected plays include Sgt. Hank Cole’s Drama Club of Algona, In the Canyon, Give It All Back, and Engines and Instruments of Flight. Recent projects include Greetings from Moscow: A Love Story, developed with Northlight Theatre and the University of Chicago, and Inside the World of Somewhere Else, a surreal exploration of digital life and self-erasure developed with Red Yes Studios in New York.

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Alongside her playwriting practice, teaching has been central to West’s professional life for more than a decade. She teaches Writing for Performance at the University of Chicago, where she leads courses in Advanced Playwriting and New Play Development. Her curriculum emphasizes sustained process, critical inquiry, and the cultivation of independent artistic practices. She also teaches at Webster University, where she has led introductory and advanced courses in playwriting and literature, as well as directed study mentorships.

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Additionally, West is a faculty member at the Einhorn School of Performing Arts at Primary Stages. There she teaches multi-level playwriting courses including Playwriting Fundamentals, First Draft Development, and Rewriting Your Draft. During the 2024–25 season, she served as an instructor for the Echoes Writers Room, a year-long program supporting women and non-binary playwrights through workshop and community-centered development.

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At the core of West’s practice is a belief that bold theatre is essential in moments of political and social fracture. In an era shaped by the rise of global authoritarianism, she views theatre as a vital site of inquiry, dissent, and collective imagination. Her plays resist fear-driven narratives by insisting on complexity, moral tension, and human contradiction. Through a career grounded in collaboration, courage, and sustained inquiry, West seeks to inspire writers to remain engaged, politically awake, and artistically uncompromising.

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UPCOMING: West’s play FEAST! will be featured in The Goodman Theatre’s New Stages Festival during the company’s centennial season, directed by Artistic Director Susan V. Booth.