who are we talking about?

Sarah Jae Leiber is a writer (mostly plays, screenplays, and film/TV/music criticism), singer (mostly Carole King covers), and actor (mostly not anymore) based in New York City. She is, crucially, from Philadelphia. She is also funny and Jewish.

sarah jae released river phoenix fugue and other pop culture plays with 1319 press in early 2025. order it here!

she spent spring and summer 2025 working on baby, it’s you, written for Serials nyc.

As a playwright and screenwriter, Sarah Jae writes about and through the lens of pop culture, Jewishness, and being a weird girl. Her first full-length play, PLEASE LAUGH, was a semifinalist for the 2024 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. It received a reading at Pete’s Candy Store in the winter of 2023, and will receive its first production in fall 2025 at the tank.

in the summer of 2025, sarah’s play, the old jew who begat scrooge, on his deathbed, won the jewish plays project’s on one foot ten-minute play contest. it was written In December of 2021, following a two-day workshop with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel, and was also chosen out of over 50 plays to be read in a festival at McCarter Theatre Center.

Muhlenberg College produced The Repair Man in the fall of 2018; Rascal Arts produced Grand Theft Tea Leaves at Theatre Row in the summer of 2017; Workshop Athens produced it in the summer of 2023. Sarah and a team of collaborators self-produced speaking strictly for me at Astoria Food Pantry in the summer of 2023; the Firebird Project produced river phoenix fugue at The Tank in the fall of 2024; in december of 2024, sarah premiered i can fix him at the dramatists guild; her 10-minute play, two of hearts, placed first in its program and advanced to the semifinals in the 2025 queens short play festival at the secret theatre. Her 30-minute TV dramedy pilot, Hearts and Bones, was a semifinalist in ScreenCraft‘s 2021 TV Pilot Script competition. Check her out on New Play Exchange and Coverfly.

Sarah covers the culture beat at Jewish Women’s Archive and has been a freelance video writer for WatchMojo and a contributing satirist at The Broadway Beat. Her byline exists at Polygon, Bitch Media, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The Niche, Film Daze, Screen Mayhem, Screen Queens, Grow Up, The Daily Drunk, Sally Mag, Small Screen, Uncomfortable Revolution, and The Validation Project. She also loves interviewing artists and has been lucky enough to speak to some of her favorites, including Rachel Bloom, Joel Grey, Norbert Leo Butz, Leslie Odom Jr., Yeardley Smith, Jane Krakowski, Kristin Chenoweth, Jaime Camil, Ariana DeBose, Stephen Root, Mike Viola, and Kenneth Branagh.

Sarah writes a pop culture newsletter called “you are my biggest fan.” She’s also “the voice” of The Flashpaper issue three, singing an original musical theatre song by Marc Jablonski, and a founding contributor to Broad Sound, an offbeat journal of arts and culture. Also, she is a dramaturg! Most recently: Museum of the Final World, a new song cycle by Josh Brown; The Firebird Project‘s production of Zoe Senese-Grossberg’s Lay the Bent to the Bonny Broom.

sarah enjoys speaking publicly and being a friend-of-the-pod (listen to her talk about U.S. presidents in musical theatre on NPR’s It’s Been A Minute, or Barbie at the Central Mass International Jewish Film Festival, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on Overhated, or Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure on Film Fest).

Sarah is an alumna of Actors Theatre of Louisville‘s 48th Professional Training Company and the 2020 TEDxBroadway Young Professionals program. She’s also worked for the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (running social media and communications for Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish in 2022), BroadwayWorld, and Lantern Theatre Company. Get in touch!