Biography of David Ives

David Ives is a playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. He was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated at Northwestern University and the Yale School of Drama. He began writing plays in the 1970s and achieved his breakthrough success in the 1990s with an evening of one-act plays called “All in the Timing” which ran Off-Broadway for over six hundred performances. He has written many full-length plays, including the Broadway production “Venus in Fur.” He has adapted French 17th- and 18th-century classical comedies, as well as thirty-three musicals for New York City’s "Encores!" series. His collaborators have included David Copperfield, Reba McEntire, and Stephen Sondheim. Ives has also written short fiction and humor pieces for Spy Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, the New York Times Magazine and The Hudson Review. He was a staff writer for Fox TV's "Urban Anxiety." He is the author of The Phobia Clinic, a horror novel written in verse, and the young adult period piece Monsieur Eek. He has taught playwriting and screenwriting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and at Columbia University.