Rick Cleveland is an American television writer, playwright, and monologist, best known for writing on the

HBO Home Box Office (HBO) is an American premium television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is ba ...

original series '' Six Feet Under'' and NBC's '' The West Wing''. His 2011 play ''The Rail Splitter'' premiered at

Carthage College Carthage College is a private college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and located in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It enrolls 2,600 full-time and 200 part-time students. Carthage awards bachelor's degrees with majors in more th ...

and traveled to the Kennedy Center

American College Theatre Festival The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) is a national theatre program dedicated to the improvement of collegiate theatre in the United States. Focused on the celebration of diverse and exciting theatre, KCACTF involves student ...

(Region 3) in 2012.

Education

Cleveland, a graduate of the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, is also a founding member of Chicago's

American Blues Theater American Blues Theater is a nonprofit, professional Equity theater company in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The ensemble currently has 30 members. History American Blues Theater was founded in 1985 as a company dedicated to new and classic ...

Career

Film

Cleveland, Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and Matthew Chapman co-wrote the 2003 film '' Runaway Jury'' based on the book by John Grisham. He also wrote a 1998 screenplay for the independent film '' Jerry and Tom''.

Television

In 2000, Cleveland and ''The West Wing'' creator Aaron Sorkin won the Emmy Award for Best Writing for a Drama Series their episode "

In Excelsis Deo "In Excelsis Deo" is the tenth episode of the first season of ''The West Wing''. It originally aired on NBC on December 15, 1999, as the show's Christmas special. Events circle around Toby Ziegler getting involved in the fate of a dead Korean Wa ...

". The episode originally aired during the 1999–2000 season. Cleveland and Sorkin also won the

Writers Guild of America Award The Writers Guild of America Awards is an award for film, television, and radio writing including both fiction and non-fiction categories given by the Writers Guild of America, East and Writers Guild of America West since 1949. Eligibility Th ...

for best episodic drama at the February 2001 ceremony for "In Excelsis Deo". Cleveland worked on the HBO original series ''Six Feet Under'' throughout the show's five season run. Cleveland joined the crew as a writer and producer for the show's first season in 2001. He wrote the episode "The Trip". He was promoted to supervising producer for the second season in 2002. He wrote two further episodes – "Driving Mr. Mossback" and "The Liar and the Whore". He remained a supervising producer for the third season in 2003. He scripted two more episodes – "Nobody Sleeps" and "Death Works Overtime". He was promoted to co-executive producer for the fourth season in 2004. He wrote two more episodes – "In Case of Rapture" and "Grinding the Corn". He was promoted again to executive producer for the fifth and final season in 2005 and wrote his last episode, "Eat a Peach". He wrote eight episodes in total for the series. Cleveland won the Jury Award for Best One Person Show at the 2006 US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado for his performance in "My Buddy Bill", about his fictional friendship with President Bill Clinton, a monologue play filmed on June 15, 2007, for a Comedy Central Special and DVD. He served as writer for the AMC television drama '' Mad Men'' for the show's second season in 2008. He was nominated for the

for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2009 ceremony for his work on the second season. Cleveland recently served as a consulting producer and writer on the Showtime series '' Nurse Jackie''.

Filmography

References

External links

*
Blog Entries by Rick Cleveland
at '' The Huffington Post''
Rick Cleveland
at Comedy Central * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cleveland, Rick Primetime Emmy Award winners Living people Writers Guild of America Award winners American television writers American male television writers University of Iowa alumni American television producers American screenwriters Year of birth missing (living people)