Rachel Atkins

Rachel Atkins is the scriptwriter for the award-winning educational theatre company Living Voices. They have twelve different multi-media shows in ongoing national touring repertory, all focusing on issues of history and social justice, and seen by over 3 million audience members throughout the US and Canada. Her play Black Like Us (Original Works Publishing) received the Theatre Puget Sound Gregory Award for Outstanding New Play, two Seattle Times Footlight Awards, including Top World Premiere, and was an American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg New Play Award nominee.

Other plays include Treadwell Gold (Perseverance Theatre, Alaska), Baalzebub (published by Theatrefolk) & Frankenstein’s Mary Shelley (both at Seattle Public Theater). Literary adaptations for Book-It Repertory Theatre include Jane Austen’s Emma (also produced by Harvard Radcliffe Summer Theater & Vintage Theatre, Colorado), Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and a variety of non-traditional texts and children’s literature. Her short plays & plays for young actors have received multiple productions nationally and worldwide. A 3-time TPS Gregory Award nominee, her other work has been produced extensively throughout the Seattle area.

Rachel holds her Masters in Educational Theatre from New York University. A member of the ArtsWA Teaching Artist roster and the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture’s Arts Partner roster, she works as a master teaching artist for Arts Impact, Seattle Public Schools Ethnic Studies, and ACT’s Young Playwrights Program.

Rachel received a 2019 GAP award for This Is Not (Y)Our History, a new play with music about race relations and conflicts within the women’s suffrage movement which centers the marginalized voices of African-American suffragists silenced by history and draws parallels to today. This valuable funding will support script and music development with her collaborators, including a free public work-in-progress showcase and voter registration drive at Seattle Public Theater on Monday, December 2, 7pm.