Heather Helinsky (she/her) is a literary manager and freelance dramaturg based in Philadelphia. From 2019-2024, was the Literary Manager for Playwrights Foundation and the Jewish Plays Project’s National Jewish Playwriting Contest (2020-current). She’s known for her unique community-centered anti-bias script reading practices, creating abundance over scarcity mindset, and deep care for the playwrights who applied. Seventeen years of experience as a professional dramaturg, and fifteen years as a dramaturgy teaching artist for the Kennedy Center, which included reading for their VSA Discovery Series, current reader for Steinberg/David Mark Cohen award, and the Undergraduate Playwrights Workshop in 2016-2020. Past work includes dramaturg at Great Plains Theatre Conference for seven seasons, and past script reader for Sundance Theatre Lab, the O’Neill, Seven Devils, GPTC, Playwrights Realm and NNPN. Notable production dramaturgy includes JT Rogers’ Oslo at PlayPenn, Tira Palmquist’s climate change play Two Degrees at DCPA, Caridad Svich’s NNPN rolling world premiere of Guapa, and director Robert Woodruff’s Britannicus at A.R.T. In addition to her Literary Manager work at for four seasons at Playwrights Foundation, she dramaturged Stefani Kuo's Final Boarding Call in 2020 and Bay Area writer Elana Dykewomon's final creative work, How to Let Your Lover Die in August 2022. When she was based in Pittsburgh from 2008-2012, she dramaturged plays as the resident dramaturg at Pittsburgh Public and PICT, as well as a Visiting Assistant Professor for Carnegie Mellon's BFA dramaturgy training program. Training: M.F.A. in Dramaturgy from the A.R.T./Moscow Art/Harvard (’07) and participated in the O’Neill National Critics Institute (’16). LMDA member since 2006, serving the Executive Committee since 2018, and currently VP of Membership for LMDA’s Executive Committee. In March 2020, she co-created the Dramaturging the Phoenix program with Ken Cerniglia and Anne Morgan to hold space, created weekly panels, and responded to LMDA’s membership through the initial waves of pandemic hardships.

new play development, script reading, community-centered selection practices, intersectional storytelling narratives. Can do classical production dramaturg (chekhov!), but not interested in classical dramatic canon at a time when living playwrights need the work right now and are better equipped to respond to this moment.

English, some Russian

Yes