Tim Blake Nelson is a celebrated writer, director, actor, and producer. He made his NYC playwriting debut in 1996 with the MCC Theater Obie Award–winning production of his play THE GREY ZONE, a searing Holocaust drama that won Nelson Newsday’s Oppenheimer Award for Best Debut Play, along with Encore Magazine’s Taking Off Award and the Berilla Kerr Award. He then adapted the play into a 2001 feature film of the same name, starring David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Mira Sorvino, and Harvey Keitel. The film won the National Board of Review’s Freedom of Expression Award. MCC Theater also premiered his 1998 play ANADARKO, set in a small-town Oklahoma jail, where the intertwined destinies of two men collide as each awaits judgment in adjacent jail cells. His debut play, EYE OF GOD, set in his native Oklahoma, first premiered at the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 1992 where it was nominated for the Kesselring Prize. This harrowing drama about a naive young woman’s fateful marriage to the disturbed ex-convict was also adapted into a feature film written and directed by Nelson, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Feature at Sundance and the Someone to Watch Independent Spirit Award, while winning the Tokyo Bronze Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival, along with Best Director at the Seattle Film Festival. As a stage actor, Nelson has starred Off-Broadway in Shakespeare in the Park’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, THE BEARD OF AVON, OEDIPUS, RICHARD III, TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, MAD FOREST, TWELFTH NIGHT, and at MTC, Playwrights Horizons, MCC, NYTW, and Soho Rep. A veteran screen actor, Nelson has nearly 100 screen credits, including O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Thin Red Line, Minority Report, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Lincoln, Nightmare Alley, Old Henry, Syriana, Fantastic Four, Holes, Donnie Brasco, Just Mercy, The Incredible Hulk, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Meet the Fockers, Captain America: Brave New World, and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. For television, he starred in HBO’s Watchmen, earning a Critics’ Choice Award nomination; and most recently appeared on FX’s The Lowdown, Peacock’s Emmy–nominated Poker Face, and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. As a filmmaker, he has written and directed five features, including Leaves of Grass, starring Edward Norton, Keri Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, and Susan Sarandon; Anesthesia, starring Sam Waterston, Kristen Stewart, Glenn Close, Gretchen Mol, and Corey Stoll; and O, a modern adaptation of OTHELLO, starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, and Julia Stiles. He published his debut novel, City of Blows, in 2023 with Unnamed Press, and debuted his second novel, Superhero, in 2025.