Jacob Juntunen

Office Hours: M 1-2 & 4:30-5:30 / T 11 - 3

Before Jacob Juntunen was a father heading the playwriting MFA at SIU and living in St. Louis, he was a 1970s kid in California watching PBS puppets. In the 1990s, Jacob was a high school dropout making sandwiches at a deli in Portland. The teachers at Clackamas Community College and Edward Albee saved him, and he got degrees from Reed College and Northwestern. In 1998 he saw a VHS tape of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre with mannequins and he’s lived in Poland repeatedly to understand it. Now he collaborates with his students a bunch, and he founded Contraband Theatre in 2016. His plays include Professor House (a memory play with a ghost, or a ghost play with memories); See You in a Minute (a comedic pandemic play set in 2041; St. Louis Circle Theater Awards Outstanding New Play nomination, 2024), 18 Months After November (about violence after a contested election, written in Oct. 2019), Hath Taken Away (the Book of Job in the modern Midwest), In the Shadow of His Language (his vexed feelings about academia), Joan’s Laughter (a kick-ass play about Joan of Arc!), and his most-produced shorts, No Winter No Worries (funny), and Saddam’s Lions (not funny). Jacob’s work has been supported by Alliance Theatre, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center (for puppets!!), Great Plains Theatre Conference, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Fulbright, the NEH, Krakow’s International Cultural Center, the Illinois Arts Council, and more. Jacob loves dramaturgs and has worked with Martine Kei Green-Rogers, Heather Helinsky, and Dan Smith. His plays and scholarship have been published by Routledge and Vintage. You can read his plays on New Play Exchange. His website has too many words, but, what can you do? He’s a writer.