Brian Yorkey is an American playwright and lyricist. His works often explore dark and controversial subject matter such as mental illness, grief, the underbelly of suburbia, and ethics in both psychiatry and public education. Early life Yorkey was born in Omaha, Nebraska, where he was raised, before his family moved to Issaquah, Washington. He graduated from Columbia University in 1993, where he served as the Artistic Director of the Varsity Show. He is an alumnus of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop. Career Early work Prior to bringing Next to Normal to Broadway, Yorkey was affiliated with Village Theatre in Issaquah, where he began as a KidStage student and eventually progressed to a seven-year tenure as Associate Artistic Director. Four musicals written by Yorkey—Funny Pages (1993), Making Tracks (2002), The Wedding Banquet (2003), and Play it by Heart (2005)—were staged there. While at Village Theatre, Yorkey founded the KidStage Company class which teaches teens to write, direct, and perform their own musicals. Yorkey's frequent collaborator, Tom Kitt, joined him in assisting with the score to the 2008 Company Original, In Your Eyes. He worked with composer Tim Symons, on other Company Originals such as Last Exit and A Perfect Fall. During Yorkey's tenure as Village Theatre's Associate Artistic Director, he developed a comprehensive new works program, Village Originals. The Village Originals program develops approximately ten new musicals each season, in various stages from reading to full production. Yorkey is credited with the development of over 50 new musicals, including the 2010 Broadway musical, Million Dollar Quartet, which was nominated for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and won Best Performance by a Featured Actor (Levi Kreis) in a Musical at the 64th Tony Awards. Next to Normal and subsequent work Next to Normal began as a ten-minute-long piece called Feeling Electric, which recent college graduates Yorkey and Kitt wrote as a final project for the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop at the end of the 1990s. Their inspiration was a segment about electroconvulsive therapy Yorkey saw on Dateline NBC. Next to Normal was nominated for a total of eleven Tony Awards, including the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. The show won the 2009 Tony Award for Best Original Score, and Tony Award for Best Orchestrations. In 2010 Yorkey and Kitt were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Next to Normal, citing "a powerful rock musical