Linda Manning is an award winning playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Her solo show, "Perfect Love", premiered at the United Solo Festival in NYC 2018 directed by Obie, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Award winner Gretchen Cryer and has also been performed at Dixon Place and the Poor Mouth Theatre Company. She has written five full length plays: "Bite the Apple" (2019 Finalist for the Kentucky Women Writers Prize); "There Is No You and Me" (2017 Finalist - New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest); "GUY" (semi-finalist for the O'Neill National Playwriting Conference 2007); "DO SOMETHING WITH YOURSELF! The Life of Charlotte Brontë" produced by The Invisible Theatre, NYC and published by Smith and Kraus; adaptation of "The Fall of the House of Usher" produced by The Invisible Theatre, NYC.

Linda will be producing and directing her play Bite the Apple in early 2022. The play is about the intersection of sexuality, desire and trauma. It dives deep into the white hot power that our childhood experiences have to define us, and the tremendous stamina of the human heart to keep alive our true selves in the most fantastically difficult and surprising circumstances.

Bite the Apple follows Cinderella on an unexpected journey through a shifting landscape into the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Rapunzel. The archetypes of the Grimm’s fairytale characters and their emotionally treacherous stories are used as an anchor, a window through which the audience can experience how the crippling, unresolved events in a woman's past, sexual abuse, abandonment, and betrayal, continue to live large in a woman’s present. The characters are brought into a modern day world twenty years after their fairy tales have ended as they approach middle age. As Cinderella weaves her way through their stories, she unearths the past she has tried to forget, and also discovers the possibility of a new story, of her own making.

The play was one of three finalists for the 2019 Kentucky Women Writers Prize.
The idea for the play came to Linda when she was reading Bruno Bettelheim’s book “The Uses of Enchantment”, which examines the importance and meaning of fairy tales in our lives. The play was first developed at The Directors Company in New York City through their New Adaptations for the Stage Workshop in 2011. A workshop production was then produced by The Other Mirror Theatre Company at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2012. After that production Linda did a significant rewrite, cutting from six to four characters, and creating a single protagonist. She then produced a staged reading in 2016 at TheaterLab in New York City.

Linda has also been published in The Dramatists Guild Blog and writes her own blog about her in life in art on her site.

She most recently wrote and acted in a series of short stories, “The Desire Monologues”, which she shared on her YouTube channel. She has co-wrote and acted in two short films, "Wake Up" and "Ghost Ride". She has written three full length screenplays: "Learning to Drive" (Grand Prize in the 2013 StoryPros Awards Screenplay Contest), "Charlotte" (second round of competition for the 2016 Sundance Screenwriters Lab), and "Divine Food".

Linda has performed in theater productions regionally (Trinity Repertory Company, Cleveland Public Theatre, Germinal Stage Denver, The Changing Scene) and in New York (Dixon Place, United Solo, NY Intl. Fringe), and she has had featured roles in numerous independent feature films most recently “Mina Martin”, Official Selection in four 2021 film festivals. Linda has worked as a teaching artist for Red Bull Theatre, Hour Children, Horace Mann School, and in NYC public schools. She has also taught master classes in screenwriting through the Bronx Council on the Arts. Linda has a Masters Degree from Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island, and a Bachelor’s from the University of Colorado at Denver.

Please visit Linda’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube Channel and her website.