Photo: Laura Hirsch
(from The Blacker The Bärry, written & composed by Stew, produced at Sarah Lawrence College, 2018)
BIO
Jackson Tucker-Meyer (he/they) is a fabulously autistic playwright, screenwriter, theatre artist, and filmmaker who makes work that is weird for weirdness' sake, determinedly anti-conventional, and shamelessly wackadoo.
Jackson's film Satan Cured My Autism won Best Mockumentary at the Museum of the Moving Image's inaugural Marvels of Media Awards in 2022. Jackson's play Banana Guy and Banana Girl with Banana Dreamz in a Krazy World was part of Roundabout Theatre Company's inaugural Reverb Theatre Arts Festival in 2021. Jackson has been an artist-in-residence with the Modern Accord Depot's MADarts program.
Three of Jackson's plays – GAME NITE, Cap'n McKrispy's Underwater Utopia, and 4 U – have been produced at Sarah Lawrence College. Jackson has written and performed two solo works: Mutant Mammal Runamuck in the Penny-Arcade of Quotidian Curiosities (Sarah Lawrence College), and How To Make A Perfect Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich (HERE Arts Center).
As an arts administrator, Jackson is Director of Programs for Actionplay, a neuroinclusive theatre nonprofit.
As a musical theatre lyricist, Jackson is a member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.
As a performer, Jackson has participated in new works by Stew (The Blacker The Bärry), Dan Hurlin (Harmless), Bluelaces (Scribble), and Rat Queen Theatre Company (Judy Doomed Us All).
As a public speaker, Jackson has given talks on the intersection of theatre and disability at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn College, the City College of New York, and the 6th International Teaching Artist Conference.
As a teaching artist, Jackson has worked with Lincoln Center, Kaiser's Room, the Actionplay Neurodivergent Playwriting Lab, and the Sarah Lawrence College Theatre Outreach Program.
MFA Theatre, Sarah Lawrence College, 2019.
Graduate of the Teaching Artist Project and the Teaching Artist Training Institute.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a writer who seeks to encourage empathy through the embrace of the eccentric, the extravagant, the extreme, the experimental, and the extraordinary.
I write the works I wish I could have experienced when I was younger: seriously goofy and gleefully outrageous, reveling in juxtaposition and contradiction. The clash of the everyday and the absurd feels very natural to me, and I delight in using bizarre scenarios and over-the-top dialogue to send up all manner of arbitrary norms, from social class to gender roles.
I cartwheel past theatrical realism (a boringly neuronormative aesthetic) to create worlds where strangeness feels familiar and the ordinary feels unusual, ideally leaving audiences more accepting of difference and otherness.
Basically, I would like to make people’s hearts bigger by making plays that are larger than life.