Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins earned his second Tony Award on Monday for his play Purpose.
Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, grew up in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington, D.C., according to a New York Times Magazine profile from 2014. He attended St. John’s College High School, graduating in 2002 before being admitted to Princeton, where he studied anthropology, and later receiving a graduate degree at New York University Tisch School For The Arts.
“I spent a ton of time being socialized in Montgomery County, in PG County, so a lot of my memories of being a teenager are actually of Maryland,” he said in an interview with WAMU on September 5, 2024.
Another of his plays, The Comeuppance, takes place in Prince George’s County, where five friends attend a high school reunion and grapple with the realities of adult life as they approach middle age.
Purpose opened in Chicago in 2023, later transferring to Broadway for the 2024-2025 season. The play is a family drama chronicling the fictional prominent Black family the Jaspers. Aside from receiving a Tony, the play also won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Jacobs-Jenkins earned his first Tony in 2023 for his play Appropriate, which won Best Revival of a Play.
