Benjamin
Graber has been a hippie doctor, a sex doctor, a psychiatrist, and a
neurobiologist. His research archives are available at the Kinsey
Institute at the University of Indiana. He holds an MA in Theatre from the University of Nebraska at Omaha
and an MD from the University of Michigan Medical School. He is a board
certified psychiatrist and neurologist and served for many years as a Professor
at the University of Nebraska Medical School. During his years in medical academics,
he authored academic articles, book chapters, abstracts, and national and
international meeting presentations, including in Italy, Mexico, Israel, and
Venezuela. His co-authored the
non-fiction text, Woman’s Orgasm, has remained in print for thirty-six years,
and his edited text, Circumvaginal Musculature and
Sexual Function is in its thirtieth year of continuous publication. He has been
a member of the International Association of Sex Researchers for thirty years.
In the world of creative writing, his short fiction and poetry have appeared in
various venues, including Fine Line Journal, Defenestration, Anti-Muse, Canopic Jar, Uber, Spillway
Review, and an anthology of Nebraska poets, Annex 22. He fell in love with
playwriting after attending the first Great Plains Theatre Conference in 2006;
subsequently the GPTC selected for their highly competitive Playlab
staged readings of two of his one act plays, Party Favor in 2007 and Wedding
Party in 2008 and two of his full length plays Warpaint
in 2009 and Heteronormativity in 2010. His first full-length play, Hippie
Doctor, his MA thesis play, achieved an unusual status for a student play: a
full production at the University of Nebraska at Omaha in their main stage
series in 2009. Warpaint, his co-authored play with
Cleveland playwright Michael Oatman, was a 2009 national finalist at the
Kennedy Center American Theatre Festival in Washington, D.C., and received its
world premiere production in 2010 at the Shelterbelt Theatre. His one act
plays, Banana Republic, Masque, and The Guru and the Turtle, and the
co-authored Snipped, have all been fully produced. His ten-minute play, End of
Limerence, has been produced several times, most recently in Florida. For
2010-2011 he was honored with Core Apprentice at the Playwrights Center in
Minneapolis where his aforementioned full-length play, Heternormativity,
was work shopped and read summer of 2010. Most recently Heteronomativity
was a finalist at the prestigious 2011 WordBRIDGE
Playwrights Laboratory. In
addition to playwriting, he has served as director, assistant director or dramaturg for many theatre productions. In 2010 he was appointed Playwright in Residence at the Universit of Nebraska at Omaha. He was deeply involved in the adding a playwriting track to the University of Nebraska's Masters in Fine Arts in Writing Low
Residency Program making it one of few such programs to have a track
exclusively for playwrights.
Since 2011 he has been serving as University of Nebraska's MFAW's
Playwright in Residence.
He lives in
Omaha with his wife Cindie, and their four dogs, Rilie, Autumn, Lexie, and Zoey.
In memory of Rex
