BELLA POYNTON is a playwright, dramaturg, and theatre critic from Buffalo, NY. Her plays have been published with Samuel French, Broadway Play Publishing, Applause, Smith & Kraus, and can be seen in The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2024, The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2019, The Best American Short Plays 2018-2019, WE-US: Monologues for Gender Minority Characters, and forthcoming in The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2025. Poynton’s creative work also appears in several literary journals including Jelly Bucket, Clock House, Fleas on the Dog, and OPEN: A Journal of Arts and Letters. Her scholarly work can be found in Comparative Drama, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Global Performance Studies, and Theatre/Practice.

Poynton is the manager of the Playwrights Wing at First Look Buffalo Theatre Company, a theatre critic for The Buffalo Hive, and the Vice President of ARTA (Association for Regional Theatre Artists, WNY). She has been conference leadership at the Mid America Theatre Conference since 2018, organizing both the Playwriting and Practice/Production Symposiums.

In 2025, Poynton won both the 12^th annual Inkslinger Playwriting contest and the 5^th annual Black Swamp Players Playwriting contest for her play, The Appliance Department. Recently, Poynton was awarded a Bethany Arts Community Interdisciplinary Artist Residency for her play in development, 2191, exploring an environmentally fractured world where AI technology is both life-sustaining and morally ambiguous. Poynton is currently working with Dr. Eero Laine and Dr. Kacey Stewart on an edited volume of new climate-change plays and eco-criticism tentatively titled, “Science Fiction Climate Dramaturgy: Scenarios for Future Havens.” She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History, Criticism, and Playwriting at SUNY Oswego State University.