Mary Lynn Owen is an award-winning playwright and actor. Her first full-length play, KNEAD, received its world premiere production at The Alliance Theatre in November 2018. KNEAD, a one-person play in which Mary Lynn also performed, is the recipient of the 2019 Gene Gabriel Moore Playwriting Award, The Alliance Theatre’s 2017 Reiser Lab Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2017 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Her second full-length play, LADY PARTS, was a semi-finalist for the 2020 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and selected for the 2019 Working Title Playwrights First Light Series and Theatrical Outfit’s 2020 Unexpected Play Festival. Her third full-length play, SALVAGE, was named a 2022 Finalist for the O'Neill National Playwright's Conference, and chosen for the 2021 Threshold New Play Festival at Actor’s Express and the 2022 Working Title Playwrights Table Series. Mary Lynn’s shorter works include the monologues HOMING, commissioned in 2020 by the 22 Homes Project for the Alabama Shakespeare Southern Writers Festival, and TRAILERS, commissioned in 2019 by MultiShades Atlanta for the MoJo Theater Festival Monologue Project. In 2020 Mary Lynn received a MAP Foundation Grant through Synchronicity Theatre to develop a play about Women and Work.
A regular performer on Atlanta’s professional stages, Mary Lynn is a two-time Suzi Award winner for both Outstanding Performer in a Leading Role and Outstanding Performer in a Supporting Role, an eight-time Suzi nominee, and a Lunt-Fontanne nominee. She is a frequent performer and collaborator in many of Atlanta's New Works Festivals including The Kendeda Festival at The Alliance Theater, The Stripped Bare Festival at Synchronicity Theater, and The Brave New Works Festival at Theater Emory.
Mary Lynn is also a sought-after teacher in Emory University’s Theater Studies Department where she teaches Introduction to Acting, yearly workshops in Teaching as Performance, and the popular, Taller de Teatro en Español (Theater Workshop in Spanish), a semester-long class designed to improve Spanish language proficiency using Theater techniques. In her ongoing collaboration with Emory’s Spanish Department, Mary Lynn has directed play readings by Spanish and Latinx playwrights, championed new work by playwrights such as Hilary Bettis, Anne Garcia Romero, and Alejandra Ramos, worked as dramaturg for Mark Valdez’ Buford Highway Project, a play about the lives of immigrants in Atlanta, and continued to master her Spanish, the native language of her mother’s Cuban-American family.
Mary Lynn’s professional affiliations include The Dramatist’s Guild/full member, Working Title Playwrights, Actor’s Equity Association, and SAG-Aftra. She has studied playwriting with Marsha Norman and Joseph Skibell and taken playwriting workshops with Kimberly Senior, Addae Moon, and Celise Kalke. Her writing residencies include The Eugene O'Neill Foundation/Tao House as the Travis Bogard Artist in Residence and the Carey Perloff Fellow; Cottages at Hedgebrook in Langley, WA; and The Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, GA.
She lives in Atlanta with her husband, Rob, and she is mom to twins, Andrew and Eloisa.