Ian Allen is a playwright, journalist, and filmmaker. In theater, he is the founder and artistic director of The Klunch, a theater collective in Washington DC, and the former artistic director of DC’s landmark theater, Cherry Red Productions, which ended a 16-year run in 2012. His playwriting credits include The Queens Chef, Tiger Mouth, Natural Duck, Savage Pieta, Angel Shit, Talk Show, Baked Baby, Thumbsucker, “Kenneth, What Is the Frequency?” (co-written with Monique LaForce). His one-act Twelve Days of Christmas won the Source’s 2003 Literary Prize, and his short Why Women Lie, and full-length 09/11/XX, were read at the Kennedy Center’s Prelude Festival, in 2003 and 2004. In 2010, Angel Shit was produced at the Gene Frankel Underground in NYC, and, Lovesick Susan and Li’l Care Bear ‘Crash’ (co-written with Emily Rems) were staged at Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysterical Theatre in the East Village. His work has also been included in the One-Minute Play Festival in DC and NYC. As a journalist, Ian’s writing has appeared in The New York Times in an op-ed examining President Trump’s policies through the lens of white supremacist fiction; and this past spring, for the The Nation, in a research driven piece detailing the far-right origin story of Trump’s racist “caravan” “invasion” narrative. He has also written for The New Republic, BUST, Brightest Young Things, and collaborated with host Kai Wright, to create the award winning sixth episode—”The Old New White Supremacist Movement”—of NPR’s hit podcast, “The United States of Anxiety.” In film, his Trapped by the Mormons was screened nationally in 2005, including a week-long run as the centerpiece of a “Mormonsploitation” series at NYC’s Pioneer Theater, and was touted, in 2019, as a cult classic by the New Yorker magazine’s Richard Brody. His second film Snuff.mov, a horrifying take on internet porn, was screened at DC’s Warehouse Theater in 2008. Most recently, his play Laura Bush Killed a Guy premiered at The Klunch in June 2017 to rave reviews and a Helen Hayes Award Nomination for star Lisa Hodsoll, and was remounted to similar acclaim at The Flea Theater in NYC in June 2018. In the fall of 2016, Ian was awarded a 30-day residency at Blue Mountain Center to work on his three-play cycle How to Win a Race War, a satire of white supremacist literature, which premiered to critical acclaim at The Klunch the following year. He is working on an adaptation of Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 epic poem, The Set-Up.