Caleen  Sinnette Jennings (Playwright) is associate professor of theater at The American University in Washington, D.C., where she teaches first and second level acting and playwriting courses, as well as academic courses in theater. She also directs for the main stage and writes and directs for two student performing companies. In 1993 she received a Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Meritorious Achievement Award for her direction of The Dining Room. Jennings’ play Casting Othello won the 1996 Washington Summer Theater Festival Award for Outstanding New Play and was produced with its companion piece, Playing Juliet, by The Source Theater Company and the Folger Library Theater in January 1998. Jennings won Washington’s Theater Lobby Award and The Source Theater’s H.D. Lewis Award and Literary Merit Award for her plays. She was a 1997 finalist for the Jane Chambers playwriting award, and a 1998 finalist for the Actors Theatre of Louisville 10-minute play competition. In 1995 alone, seven of her pieces were produced in the Washington metropolitan area. Sunday Dinner was published by Dramatic Publishing in 1993, and her collection of plays for young performers, A Lunch Line, was published by New Plays in 1989. Jennings is also a performer and a member of the acting faculty for the Teaching Shakespeare Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library. She received a B.A. in theater from Bennington College and an M.F.A. in theater from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is married and has two sons.