Janine Nabers

Janine Nabers is an American playwright and television writer.

Early life
Nabers was born in Houston, Texas to Janet and Cornelius Nabers. She attended Alief Elsik High School in Houston. Nabers has a BA in theater from Ithaca College and an MFA in playwriting from The New School. She is also a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at the Juilliard School in New York City.

Theater
Nabers was initially interested in becoming a stage actress but her frustration with the lack of black roles in plays encouraged her to try playwriting instead. In her time at Juilliard, her play Annie Bosh is Missing was chosen as a finalist for the 2012-2013 Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition. Annie Bosh is Missing follows 22-year-old drug addict Annie Bosh who wanders the tumultuous streets of Houston after Hurricane Katrina. The play had its premiere at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2013.

Nabers' play, Serial Black Face, about a single mother coping with the disappearance of her son during the Atlanta child murders, won the 2014 Yale Drama Series prize. The award included publication by the Yale University Press. Serial Black Face had its world premiere at the Actor's Express Theatre Company in Atlanta, Georgia in 2016.

Nabers' other works include A Swell in the Ground, which premiered at the Gift Theatre in Chicago, Illinois in 2017 and Welcome to Jesus, which premiered at The American Theater Company in Chicago in 2017, Juniper; Jubilee and The Peterson Show.

Television
Nabers' television writing credits include Bravo's first scripted series Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce, Lifetime's UnREAL and AMC's Dietland. She is credited as Supervising Producer on the first and second episodes of HBO's Watchmen and Co-Executive Producer on Netflix's Away. She was a writer on the third season of Atlanta, and in 2021 she signed an overall deal with Amazon Studios. In 2023, Swarm, the series Nabers co-created with Donald Glover, was released on Amazon’s Prime Video.

Honors and awards
In 2011, Nabers was the recipient of the Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship. In 2012, she was named a New York Theatre Workshop Playwriting Fellow. Nabers won the 2013 New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting fellowship and was the 2013-2014 AETNA Playwriting Fellow at Hartford Stage. She is an alumna of the Ars Nova Play Group, the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Dramatists Guild Playwriting Fellowship, the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and the 2010 and 2011 Sundance Theatre Labs. She is also a member of the MCC Playwrights Coalition and the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group at Primary Stages. As a 2015-2016 participant in the LA Writers' Workshop at Center Theater Group, she won the Fadiman Playwriting Award in 2018 for her play The Peterson Show. She was a 2016-2017 member of the Echo Theater Playwright's Lab.

As a supervising producer on HBO's Watchmen, Nabers was nominated for Writers Guild of America Awards for Best New Series and Best Drama Series and won the Best New Series award in 2020.

Theatre

 * Juniper; Jubilee
 * Annie Bosh is Missing
 * Serial Black Face
 * A Swell in the Ground
 * Welcome to Jesus
 * The Peterson Show

Selected works

 * Nabers, Janine. "Juniper; Jubilee." Off Off Broadway Festival Plays, 33rd Series, edited by Thomas C. Dunn. New York: Samuel French, 2008 ISBN 9780573670367
 * Nabers, Janine. Letters to Kurt, Playscripts Incorporated, 2012 ISBN 9781623844172
 * Nabers, Janine. Decade: Twenty New Plays about 9/11 and Its Legacy, edited by Samual Adamson, London: Nick Hern Books, 2012 ISBN 9781848422308
 * Nabers, Janine. Serial Black Face. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015 ISBN 0300211376
 * Nabers, Janine. "Serial Black Face." The Kilroys List: 97 Monologues and Scenes by Female and Trans Playwrights. Volume One, edited by Annah Feinberg for The Kilroys, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017 ISBN 9781559365352