About

Madison Epner is a playwright and stage manager (AEA) currently based in upstate New York. Her brain functions best inside theaters.

She graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in May 2025 (Phi Beta Kappa) with a B.A. in the Writing Seminars and a minor in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her writing holds a magnifying glass to the absurdities inherent to life as a young adult — from discovering that everyone on the double date you set up has already dated one another, to fighting over the last piece of cake in the dining hall, to staking out a breakup in a graveyard.

Ten of her one-act plays have received full productions through Witness Theater at Johns Hopkins, showcase dates ranging from Fall 2021 through Spring 2025. She self-produced her full-length play Cousins’ Lunch through the JHU Theatre Arts & Studies Department in the Fall of 2024, after redeveloping the play through an independent study with Peg Denithorne in the department and receiving funding from the Taylor Theatre Fund. In 2023, she wrote the book for a Peabody Institute composition student’s senior thesis, entitled Making it Click, which will receive a second production in Baltimore in the summer of 2026.

Before college, her short play Skeptic got read and produced through SheNYC’s CreateHER program (Spring 2020 cohort), and she produced an online reading for the first draft of Cousins’ Lunch (written in an independent study with playwright Ed Schmidt) in Spring 2021.

Epner stage-managed a total of 12 shows in college, 9 times through Witness Theater (Winter 2022 through Spring 2024), once through the JHU Ballet Company (Spring 2024 — Romeo & Juliet), and twice through the JHU Theatre Arts & Studies department (Spring 2024 — Galileo, dir. James Glossman & Spring 2025 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, dir. James Glossman). She has been lauded for her ability to combine competent leadership and fun, thorough rehearsal reports, and proficiency in ripping gaff tape.

Outside of playwriting and stage management, Epner:

Served on the Witness Theater executive board as the Executive Producer (2024–2025), Technical Director (2023–2024), and Assistant Technical Director (2022–2023).
Interned at Out of the Box Theatrics during the Summer of 2024.
Has various other theatrical credits as a light/sound board operator, props designer, actor, and ASM.
Taught elementary-school writing lessons through the non-profit Writers in Baltimore Schools (2023–2025).
Has two published works: one short story (Worse Human History Class, Wilder Things Magazine, Spring 2023) and one poem (Manhattanhenge (pg 32), Gyroscope Review, Spring 2025).

This year, she got rejected from a small handful of playwriting MFA programs, joined the real world working for a handful of political campaigns, and has been working on a play entitled In Miniature, about a college dropout-turned-miniature bathtub maker integrating herself into a community of wacky salespeople at a dollhouse-furniture convention in Ohio. You will know when it’s ready.