BRENNAN COLUMBIA-WALSH was raised in New Jersey. A published member of the Dramatists Guild, Brennan has directed and starred in his plays on international stages, including at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Yale Schwarzman Center, the New Haven Off Broadway Theater, the Burgdorff Center for the Performing Arts, the Montclair Deetjen Theatre, and the Jersey Shore Performing Arts Center. He is twice the winner of NJ’s statewide Young Playwrights Festival and has completed residencies at the Yale Schwarzman Center and The Theater Project. As an essayist, Brennan’s essay “Scrupulosity” won the Henry P. Wright Prize for creative nonfiction, and his critical essays won Yale’s prizes for scholarship in political philosophy and English literature. His thesis examined Niccolò Machiavelli’s influence on Shakespearean tragedy.

He graduated cum laude with a B.A. in English (Creative Writing) and Political Science from Yale University, where he also won five Creative and Performing Arts Awards, the Frank M. Patterson Award for Public Service, the Robert E. Lewis Trophy, and the Richter Summer Research Fellowship.

Brennan is the Co-Founder of the Appalachian Civic Fellowship, a nonprofit summer academy that teaches foundational texts to high-schoolers in Eastern Kentucky. He is now pursuing an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge.