Christopher Staskel is a writer and musical theatre lyricist-librettist and winner of the 2020 Fred Ebb Award.

He received the 2019 ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Lyric Award following a concert of his work (with collaborator Ben Bonnema) at the John F. Kennedy Center in D.C. 

His and Bonnema’s musical ONE WAY—about the first one-way mission to Mars—was selected for NAMT’s 2019 Festival of New Musicals, the Johnny Mercer Foundation Songwriters Project, and the Rhinebeck Writers Retreat. Other work includes THE FIREBIRD (with Lisa Whitson Burns), which was a finalist for the 2014 National Music Theater Conference, and his one-act SLASH (with Ben Bonnema), commissioned by UglyRhino Productions as a theatrical drinking game. He was a 2015 Kleban Prize finalist and a winner (with Max Mamon) of NY City Center’s 2014 Sondheim Remix contest, which granted him the surreal opportunity to rap for Stephen Sondheim.

Chris holds a B.F.A. in Music Theatre from Elon University and an M.F.A. from the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He works at a cat cafe.