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Meron Langsner is an award-winning playwright, theatre & performance scholar, and educator as well as a critically acclaimed fight director & movement specialist for theatre, film, & opera.
He was one of three writers in the country selected for the pilot year of the National New Play Network Emerging Playwright Residencies, fulfilling his residency at the New Repertory Theater in Boston, Massachusetts. Meron's plays have been performed around the country and overseas and developed at venues that include the Lark Play Development Center in NYC, New Rep, Playwrights Commons Freedom Arts Retreat, the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival, and the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska (where he later had the honor of returning as a featured artist). Publishers of his dramatic work include Bloomsbury, Smith & Kraus, Applause Theatre Books, Next Stage Press, and YouthPLAYS. Several of his plays are available on NPX: The New Play Exchange.
Meron's scholarly work on theatre and performance has been published by McFarland, Oxford University Press, Puppetry International, the Electronic Journals of Martial Arts and Sciences, and other imprints. In 2010 he was a Summer Fellow at Northwestern University's Performance Studies Institute. He has presented his research and taught workshops at numerous scholarly conferences throughout the United States and Canada, including: ASTR, ATHE, the Comparative Drama Conference, and the International Puppetry Conference. Meron has also written on theatre for popular and trade publications including American Theatre, Backstage, HowlRound, The Theatre Times, and The Sondheim Review.
As a fight director and movement specialist, Meron has composed violence for well over one hundred and seventy-five productions, tours, and films. He has worked with A.R.T. - The American Repertory Theatre, ArtsEmerson, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, New Repertory Theater, Lyric Stage Company, Ensemble Studio Theater, La MaMa, PBS, and numerous academic venues, with many productions winning regional awards.
Some of Meron's favorite directing credits include the 2006 production of Tonya & Nancy: The Opera at the A.R.T.'s Zero Arrow Theatre, which attracted international media attention, No Exit at Tufts University, Something Rotten: Hamlet Remixed with Whistler in the Dark, and segments of Susan-Lori Parks 365 Days/365 Plays project during the year of its premiere.
He has taught courses at Boston University, Emerson College, New York Film Academy, Prescott College, The Tom Todoroff Acting Conservatory, and Tufts University (where he received the Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education). He has also given guest lectures and workshops for organizations that include Cabinet, Stage Source, The Gallery Players, and numerous educational institutions (in institutions as diverse as NYU, Salve Regina University, and Citizen Schools). He created & curated Whistler in the Dark Theatre's Schollah Holla Project, a series of scholarly panels accompanying their 2012-2013 season.
Meron's poems have been published by bear creek haiku, Laurel Moon, and other journals, and his humor has appeared in Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He has worked as a freelance journalist for several newspapers in the Greater Boston and New York areas and has also contributed to various popular websites including The Good Men Project and Thought Catalog.
He is an alumnus of Athena Theatre's 2017 Athena Writes play development project and of Project Y Theatre's Playwrights' Group, and Stony Brook Southhampton's NYC Audio Podcast Fellows. He was also a founding member of both the International Theatre Ensemble (NYC) and the International Company Project, and a former board member of the Small Theatre Alliance of Boston. Also while in New England, he was an Artistic Associate of the award-winning Whister in the Dark Theatre and an Associate of Playwrights Commons.
Meron holds a PhD in Theatre History & Dramatic Literature from Tufts University, an MFA in Theatre Arts with a concentration in Playwriting from Brandeis, and an MA in Performance Studies from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He did his undergraduate work at Carnegie Mellon University and SUNY Buffalo. Additionally, he holds Executive Certificates in Finance and Business Law from Cornell University as well as a Certificate in Software Development from Columbia Engineering.
Meron is the creator of Slippery Slope, an audio-drama podcast imagining a near future United States in which various forces are taken to their absurdly logical conclusions.
Additionally, he is an alum of BUNAC's International Work Exchange Program in the UK, completed the Boston Marathon in 2010 with the Tufts Presidential Marathon Challenge Team, and holds a black belt in Okinawan Matsubayashi-Ryu Karate. He has lived in four out of five boroughs of New York City, as well as in Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, England, Scotland, and Israel.
Meron is a proud member of The Dramatists Guild, SAFD: The Society of American Fight Directors, the Alliance for Jewish Theatre, and LMDA: Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas, as well as a life member of The Episcopal Actor's Guild.
He also proudly maintains memberships at The Penn Club of New York, the New York Public Library's Friends of the Library for the Performing Arts, Culture Lab LIC, Poster House, the Horological Society of New York, the Real Estate Board of New York, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is a Patron of the Founder's Circle. Meron is also registered as a Marriage Officiant with the Office of the City Clerk in NYC.