Alena
Smith

Alena Smith is a playwright and television writer, recently named one of Variety’s 10 TV Writers to Watch. She is a writer and producer on Showtime’s The Affair, and previously wrote for HBO’s The Newsroom. An original television series she created is in development with Anonymous Content. Alena’s plays include The New Sincerity (Bay Street Theater; Theater Wit), The Bad Guys (Second Stage Theatre), Plucker (Southwark Playhouse), The Sacrifices (Public Theater/Summer Play Festival), and The Lacy Project (American Repertory Theater; Ohio Theatre). The Bad Guys was adapted into a film which premiered at the 2015 Austin Film Festival. Alena was a member of the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater. She received her M.F.A. in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, and studied philosophy at Haverford College and the University of Oxford. In addition to writing for theater and television, Alena created the Twitter character @TweenHobo, which The Believer called “one of the most imaginative uses for Twitter so far.” Tween Hobo: Off The Rails, a novel based on the account, was published by Gallery Books in 2014. Her essays about writing for theater, television and the internet have been published in Grantland and the Los Angeles Review of Books.