Edwin (Ed) Wilson (City University of New York, Graduate Center, Emeritus) attended Vanderbilt University, the University of Edinburgh, and Yale University, where he received an MFA and the first doctor of fine arts degree awarded by Yale. He has taught theatre at Vanderbilt, Yale, and, for more than 30 years, at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University. He is the author of several original plays and has produced multiple Broadway plays and films.

For 22 years he was the theatre critic of the Wall Street Journal. A longtime member of the New York Drama Critics Circle, he was president of the Circle for several years. He is on the board of the John Golden Fund and served a term as president of the Theater Development Fund (TDF) whose board he was on for 23 years. He has served a number of times on the Tony Nominating Committee and the Pulitzer Prize Drama Jury.

He is the author or coauthor of the three most widely used college theatre textbooks in the United States: The Theatre Experience, Theatre: The Lively Art (coauthored with Alvin Goldfarb), and Living Theatre (coauthored with Alvin Goldfarb).