Dan O’Brien was awarded The Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University for 2006-2007. His play The Voyage of the Carcass had its off-Broadway premier with 2005 Tony-winner Dan Fogler in October 2006 at the SoHo Playhouse. Previous productions of his work include The Dear Boy (Michael John Garcés, dir.), Moving Picture (Darko Tresnjak, dir.), Key West at Geva Theatre Center (Skip Greer, dir.), Am Lit, and Her First Screen Test.  His plays have been developed at many theaters, including Roundabout Theatre Company, Atlantic Theater Company, New York Theatre Workshop, O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Primary Stages, Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab, and Manhattan Theatre Club. He has received playwriting commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, Ensemble Studio Theatre and Trinity Repertory Company; as well as residencies and fellowships from Yaddo, O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Sewanee the University of the South, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation.

His awards and honors include the Osborn Award by the American Theatre Critics Association; the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award; and the National Student Playwriting Award and the National AIDS Award for Playwriting (Kennedy Center/ACTF). His plays have been published by Samuel French, Dramatic Publishing, and Playscripts Inc.; and have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, and Blackbird.  His short stories have been published in the anthology 25 And Under/Fiction (Doubletake/W.W. Norton, 1997), and the journals StoryQuarterly, Quarterly West, Greensboro Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Louisville Review, Ellipsis, and Salt Hill. O'Brien holds a B.A. in English & Theatre from Middlebury College and a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting & Fiction from Brown University. He has taught playwriting at Princeton University, Brown University, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Primary Stages; he has also been a guest artist at Middlebury College and Brown University, and in 2002-03, and 2005, he was the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at Sewanee the University of the South. He currently teaches playwriting at Princeton, SUNY Purchase, and Primary Stages. He lives in New York City.