Michael Merino has been a member of Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s playwrights PlayGround since 2004 (Washington, DC). He presented a reading of his full-length political comedy, The Quick Brown Fox Jumped over the Lazy Dogs, at the Kennedy Center’s 2006 Page-to-Stage New Play Festival. The work was named as a semi-finalist at the Playwrights’ Center’s PlayLabs Festival (Minneapolis, MN). His play, Artist and Protector of Children: The Life of Henry Darger, was named as a finalist for the Charles M. Getchell Award by the Southeast Theatre Conference and was also read at the Kennedy Center’s 2005 new play festival. 

As a member of the Lower Garden Project Theater in New Orleans, he wrote and directed Priests Know More – Papal Command Performance, a Catholic folk Mass parody; Hemispheric Dysfunctionalism and the Cortical Titanic, a multi-media performance piece; Rasputin: The Fall of the Romanovs and the Russian Revolution, an historical epic/farce; and No Wonder, a play about the nuclear family and the arms race. He adapted No Fatties, No Femmes from a short story by Lorrie Moore and adapted Georg Buechner’s Woyzeck. He has written a libretto for a children’s opera, Jack and the Beanstalk, for the Metro Pelican Opera Company.