Tee O’Neill, PhD is an award-winning Australian playwright whose work spans theatre and non-fiction. Her performance-based PhD was based upon writing about the lives of real individuals. Upriver Press (USA) published the nonfiction book Writing the Biographical Drama, based on her Phd.
She has lived as a playwright in residence around the world including New York, Dublin, Singapore and New Zealand; represented Australia in the Royal Court international residency, London; was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship; and has won or been nominated for the Edward Albee New Play awards, NSW and WA literary awards, Writer’s Guild, the Patrick White, Corkadorka Award as well as Australia Council fellowships.
O’Neill’s work explores the unstable borders between belonging and exile, and the stories we create in order to survive. Her characters seek freedom in societies determined to define or control them—often alongside an animal whose presence challenges the human version of events.
When not writing, O’Neill is bounding around her farm in the Yarra Valley in Victoria, Australia, slavishly attending to seven equine therapy horses, five rescue steers, and two rescue dogs. She has a Substack newsletter The Horse as Muse that charts how horses can inspire a more peaceful and better creative life.
She is not to be mistaken as a relative of Eugene O’Neill, though she is an admirer!
