Beau Willimon

Beau Willimon
Willimon at the PEN Gala, May 2015.
Born	Pack Beauregard Willimon (1977-10-26) October 26, 1977 (age 39) Alexandria, Virginia, U.S.
Residence	Brooklyn, New York
Alma mater	Columbia University Juilliard School
Occupation	Playwright, screenwriter, producer

Pack Beauregard "Beau" Willimon (born October 26, 1977) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is the creator of the Netflix original series House of Cards and served as showrunner for the first four seasons.

Beau Willimon was born in Alexandria, Virginia, to Nancy and Henry Pack Willimon. His father was a captain in the United States Navy and the family moved frequently. Willimon lived in Hawaii, San Francisco, California, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, before settling in St. Louis, Missouri, after Willimon's father retired to become a lawyer.

Willimon attended John Burroughs School, where he took drama classes taught by Jon Hamm and graduated in 1995. He majored in visual arts and received a BA from Columbia University in 1999. When he was an undergraduate, he met Jay Carson. In 1998, he worked as a volunteer and intern for the Senate campaign of Charles Schumer, which led to jobs with Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate campaign, Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential campaign, and Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. After graduating, he worked for the ministry of the interior for the Estonian government in Tallinn as part of a fellowship, during which he sorted through and wrote summaries of thousands of pages of E.U.-related documents. Shortly after, he moved to Vietnam to work for a small cultural magazine, and there did research for his first screenplay, based on the life of Tomas Vu, a visual arts professor at Columbia who grew up in Vietnam during the war.