Emily Duncan is an award-winning writer, dramaturg, and director based in Ōtepoti-Dunedin.
She won the 2020 Bruce Mason Award, the 2021 Adam NZ Play Award, as well as the Best Play by a Woman Playwright, and the McNaughton South Island Play Award categories for & Sons, and the 2022 McNaughton South Island Play Award for her adaptation of Katherine Mansfield’s The Woman at the Store.
Emily was the inaugural artist in residence at St Hilda’s Collegiate in 2017. In this role she wrote In Our Shoes, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Adam NZ Play Award. Other writing awards include Playmarket’s Plays for the Young and The Robert Lord New Script Award (Dunedin Theatre Awards) for Eloise in the Middle. Le Sujet Parle was shortlisted for the 2019 Adam New NZ Play Award.
With producer H-J Kilkelly, Emily established and co-directed Prospect Park Productions (2016-24), home of Ōtepoti Theatre Lab. Under the Prospect Park banner she wrote and directed all three seasons of the Dark Dunedin podcast and co-hosted Play:Notes podcast with Allison Horsley.
As a dramaturg, Emily was the mentor/script advisor for the Fortune Theatre’s Studio 4 x 4 Emerging Playwrights Initiative (2017-18), co-directed Otepoti Theatre Lab (2019-23), and has been a script advisor for Playmarket’s Te Hono: Connection programme and Centrepoint Theatre’s Playwriting Intensive.
Emily holds a PhD in Theatre from the University of Otago and was the university’s 2019 Robert Burns Fellow. She received both the Friends of the Hocken Collections Award 2023 and the Whakahoa Kaitoi Te Puna Toi Arts For All Fellowship in 2023. For the latter she researched and wrote the resource Between the Lines, to help address gaps in accessibility for both neurodivergent (ND) playwrights, and in turn dramaturgs.
Emily is a 2024 Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature virtual writer in residence with Melbourne Writers Theatre.
In addition to playwriting and dramaturgy, she trained as an actor at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute (NYC) and at RADA’s summer school (London).