Calamity West is an award-winning playwright and educator whose work has been developed, produced, and presented by leading institutions including The Goodman, 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 is concluding her Primary Stages residency with Parallax (2026), her new play examining community, power, and the fragile social order of HOAs.

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West’s body of work spans nearly 15 years of productions, commissions, and long-term development processes. Some of her favorite plays include: Sgt. Hank Cole's Drama Club of Algona, In the Canyon, Give It All Back, Engines and Instruments of Flight, and Greetings From Moscow! A Love Story. West continues to focus on developing new plays and maintaining long-term relationships with theaters dedicated to new work. Her practice remains rooted in the collaborative process and the continuous evolution of her writing.

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Her 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 a central component of 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 engagement and the development of independent artistic practices. She also teaches at Webster University, where she has led introductory and advanced courses in both playwriting and literature, as well as directed study mentorships.

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In addition to her teaching at the university level, West is a faculty member at the Einhorn School of the Performing Arts at Primary Stages, where 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 dedicated to supporting women and non-binary playwrights through workshop and community engagement.​

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At the core of West’s practice is a belief that bold theatre is not optional in moments of political and social fracture. In an era marked by the rise of global authoritarianism, she sees theatre as a necessary site of inquiry, dissent, and collective imagination. Her plays aim to push back against fear-driven narratives by insisting on complexity, moral tension, and human contradiction. By modeling a career rooted in collaboration, courage, and sustained inquiry, West seeks to inspire writers to remain engaged, politically awake, and artistically uncompromising in the face of increasing pressure to stay quiet.

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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.