Beverly Trader Austin (playwright/lyricist) has enjoyed more than three dozen productions of her plays. Beginning in 1974, her work has been professionally performed and favorably reviewed in London, New York, Palm Beach, Los Angeles, and around the Southeast.

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The 2020 co-winner of the prestigious Essential Theatre Playwriting Award for her script The Wishing Place, produced to sold-out houses in September 2023 at Atlanta's 7 Stages,  Bev is also currently working on a script about Nashville's "girl singers."  

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​Austin has benefited from grants from the Yip Harburg Foundation, Ford Foundation, AT&T New Playwrights, Harland Foundation, Kroger Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and  Individual Artist Grants from the Georgia Council for the Arts.  She is a founding member of the Atlanta New Play Project, a board member of the Southeast Playwrights Project, a current member of Working Title Playwrights, and a longtime member of the Dramatists Guild.  She was also  represented for years by the Dorese Agency in Los Angeles.

 

Austin has worked lights, stage managed, designed and sewn costumes, taught theatre and playwrighting to young people, and even served as box-office manager at the Soho Poly in London. Beverly has been awarded separate month-long residences with Ted Tally and Romulus Linney, and studied with numerous other master playwrights.  Bev was  chosen as an Associate Member of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre.  And she recently served as a Recommending, World Premiere, and Play Panel  Judge for Atlanta's major professional theatre awards, the SUZI's-- where she was elected to the SUZI Board of Directors.

 

She also earned eight semesters of Georgia Staff Development Units, in everything from Advanced Storytelling to Technical Theatre from the Alliance Theatre School-- for which she conducted "Kids Write Plays" workshops for years. Bev has appeared on numerous panels, including ones for the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America, the SUZI awards, and the MOJO Fest.  She auditioned and was chosen as a member of Atlanta's Academy Theatre First Stage Company, and she wrote the State of Georgia's Drama Curriculum Guide, Grades K-12. 

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Cakewalk,  Bev's musical with composers Bryan Mercer and Patrick Hutchison was chosen for July, 2017's Atlanta Musical Theatre Festival at Out Front Theatre.  Cakewalk was originally given a public reading (March, 2015) by Gateway Performance Productions under a grant from the City of Atlanta’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs.  It was directed and produced by Sandra Hughes and Scott DePoy. For more information on this and other productions, please click on the links above right.