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KEITH JOSEF ADKINS is a playwright and screenwriter. His plays include SWEET HOME (MPAACT Theater, Chicago), SUGAR AND NEEDLES (Epic Theater), THE FINAL DAYS OF NEGRO-VILLE, THE DANGEROUS, a commission at The Public Theater, SAFE HOUSE, a commission honoring August Wilson @ Alliance Theater (Goodman Theater New Stages), FAREWELL MISS COTTON (Black Dahlia Theater), PITBULLS (Bay Area Playwrights Festival), THE LAST SAINT ON SUGAR HILL (MPAACT Theater), ON THE HILLS OF BLACK AMERICA. Awards: Gateway Commission from Obie Award-winning Epic Theater, Contemporary Theatre/Hansberry Project Commission, New Professional Theater Playwright Award, Kesselring Fellowship nomination, Richard Sherwood Distinguished Emerging Theater Artist Award, Van Lier Fellowship with NYTW and Sloan Science Foundation Playwriting Grant. Keith has been published in Humana Festival 2003 – The Complete Plays, Playscripts, and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2005. Keith worked as a writer on the CW hit comedy GIRLFRIENDS, blogged for TheRoot.com and made radio appearances on NPR and BBC Worldservice Radio.
Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Akhtar is the author of American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), published in over 20 languages and named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012, as well as the forthcoming novel, Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.) in September 2020. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations). As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. Among other honors, Akhtar is the recipient of the Steinberg Playwrighting Award, the Nestroy Award, the Erwin Piscator Award, as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, the Sundance Institute, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. Additionally, Ayad is a Board Trustee at PEN/America, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and New York Theatre Workshop. He lives in New York City.
Zakiyyah Alexander is a playwright who also writes television and occasionally performs. She is the author of: 10 Things to do before I die (commissioned and produced by Second Stage), SICK? (Summer Play Festival), THE ETYMOLOGY OF BIRD (Central Park Summerstage, Hip Hop Theater Festival, Providence Black Repertory Theatre), BLURRING SHINE (Market Theater, Johannesburg, NY International Fringe Festival), SWEET MALADIES (Rucker Theatre, Bay Area Playwrights Festival), something new (commissioned by Philadelphia Theater Company), black Picasso, and (900). Her work has been seen and/or developed at: A Contemporary Theater (ACT), Bristol Riverside Theater, Philadelphia Theater Company, The Humana Festival, Penumbra Theater, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Rattlestick Theater, Hartford Stage, 24/7 Theater Company, the Hip Hop Theater Festival, Vineyard Theater, the Women’s Project, GAle GAtes et. al, La Mama Theatre, Greenwich Street Theater, etc. Awards include: Helen Merrill Emerging Playwriting Award, ACT New Play Award/Lorainne Hanseberry Prize, Stellar Network Award, Theodore Ward Prize, Jackson Phelan Award, Van Lier Award at New Dramatists, Drama League New Directors/New Works, New Professional Theatre Playwriting Award, Young Playwrights Inc. Her work is included in the current edition of New Monologues for Women by Women, the anthology, Say Word!, featured in the book of essays, Girls who like Boys who like Boys, Game on: The Humana Festival ’08 Anthology. An alumnus of New Dramatists; past residencies and fellowships include: EST’s Youngblood, the Women’s Project Writer’s Lab, the Women’s Work Project, and the Drama League. She has received commissions from: Second Stage, The Philadelphia Theater Company and the Children’s Theater of Minneapolis. A founding member of the advocacy group, The Kilroys, and a former writer for the television show, Grey’s Anatomy. Zakiyyah is a native New Yorker and was raised in Queens and Brooklyn.
Luis Alfaro works in theater, performance, poetry, and journalism. A Chicano born and raised in the Pico-Union district of downtown Los Angeles, he is tenured at the University of Southern California. Alfaro is the first playwright-in-residence in the history of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, serving for six seasons. Previously, he was a resident artist at the Mark Taper Forum for ten years. Recent work includes; Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles presented at Victory Gardens, Oregon Shakespeare, Portland Center Stage, Getty Villa; St. Jude presented at Victory Gardens, Kirk Douglas Theatre; Oedipus El Rey presented at Public Theatre, Victory Gardens, Dallas Theatre Center, Magic Theatre, Boston Court, Woolly Mammoth, Milagro; Electricidad presented at Goodman, Mark Taper Forum, over 30 productions; Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner presented at Oregon Shakespeare, Hartford Stage; and Black Butterfly presented at Mark Taper Forum, Kennedy Center, Smithsonian Museum. Alfaro has performed his solo work across the United States and in England and Mexico, including Institute of Contemporary Art London, Getty Center, Boston Center for the Arts, Hirshhorn Museum, and X-Teresa Performance Space Mexico City. He has an award-winning PBS short film, Chicanismo, and spoken-word recording, downtown, on New Alliance Records.
Christina Anderson's work has appeared at The Public Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Penumbra Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, and other theaters in the United States and Canada. Awards and honors: Inaugural Harper Lee Award for Playwriting, two PONY nominations, three Susan Smith Blackburn nominations, and Woursell Prize Finalist. Christina obtained her B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama’s Playwriting Program. She's a resident playwright at New Dramatists, Epic Theatre Ensemble, and a DNAWORKS Ensemble member.
Ngozi Anyanwu . Education: University of California San Diego's (MFA acting) Point Park University (B.A) Acting :The Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Barrington Stage, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and The Mark Taper Forum. TV credits: Limitless, Deadbeat, The Affair Law and Order SVU and Mysteries of Laura and the upcoming HBO show The Deuce. Producer: National Black Theatre Producing Fellow. Associate Artistic Producer of Now Africa's Playwrights Festival. She is also on the Literary committee of the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre. Director: She Gon Learn, by Lisa Strum for the Emerging Arts Festival, United Solo Festival, National Black Theater. Playwrighting:Good Grief, Nike and The Homecoming Queen. Good Grief was presented as part of the Rising Circle Collective’s 6th annual Ink Tank. Most recently Good Grief won the Inaugural CTG/Humanitas Award. And had a world premiere at the CTG/Kirk Douglas Theatre in the 2016/17 season as well as being listed in the 2016 annual Kilroy's List and was a semi finalist for the Princess a Grace. NIKE was recently presented as part of the National Black Theatre’s Keep Soul Alive Monday Reading Series and The NewBlack Fest in conjunction with The Lark Playwrighting Development Center. An excerpt of The Homecoming Queen was developed as part of The Fire This Time's Inaugural's Writers group, Page 73’s summer residency and The New Harmony Project. The Homecoming Queen will have a world premiere at The Atlantic Theatre in the 17/18 season and is a Leah Ryan Finalist. Anyanwu is also a recipient of the Djerassi Artist Residency, as well as Space on Ryder Farm and the LCT Playwrights Residency and The Founders Award with New York Stage and Film.
Jaclyn Backhaus is a playwright, cofounder of Fresh Ground Pepper, and new member of The Kilroys. Her plays include Men On Boats (New York Times Critics’ Pick, Clubbed Thumb, Playwrights Horizons, published by Dramatists Play Service), India Pale Ale (Manhattan Theatre Club, recipient of the 2018 Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play), You Across From Me (co-written with three other writers for the Humana Festival), Folk Wandering (book writer and co-lyricist with 11 composers, Pipeline Theatre Company), and You On the Moors Now (Theater Reconstruction Ensemble), among others. She was the 2016 Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence at Clubbed Thumb and she is currently in residence at Lincoln Center. Backhaus holds a BFA in Drama from NYU Tisch, where she now teaches. She hails from Phoenix, Arizona, and currently resides in Ridgewood, Queens with her husband, director Andrew Scoville and their son Ernie.
Tanya Barfield’s most recent play, Bright Half Life, was a Time Out New York Critic’s Pick and will be seen regionally at numerous theaters throughout the country. It premiered Off-Broadway at the Women’s Project Theatre. Her play, Blue Door, was seen regionally at South Coast Rep, Playwrights Horizons, Berkeley Rep, and many others. Blue Door was a New York Times Readers’ Pick and was featured internationally at the Harare International Festival of the Arts in Zimbabwe. Other plays include: The Call (Playwrights Horizons/Primary Stages; New York Times Critic’s Pick), Feast (co-writer, Young Vic/Royal Court), Of Equal Measure (Center Theatre Group, NAACP Theatre Awards nominee), Chat (New Dramatists’ Playtime Festival), and The Quick (New York Stage & Film). Short plays include: Medallion (Women’s Project/Antigone Project), Foul Play (Royal Court Theatre, Cultural Center of Brazil), The Wolves, and Wanting North (Guthrie Theatre Lab, named Best 10-Minute Play of 2003). A recipient of a Lilly Award, the inaugural Lilly Award Commission, and a Helen Merrill Award, Tanya is an alumna of New Dramatists and a member of The Dramatist Guild Council. In 2016, The Profile Theatre is devoting their entire season to her work. TV credits include: “The One Percent”, “The Americans”, and “Mrs. America”.
Poet and performer Aziza Barnes was born in Los Angeles. They earned a BFA from New York University and an MFA from the University of Mississippi. Barnes is author of full-length collections the blind pig (2019) and i be but i ain’t (2016), which won a Pamet River Prize, and the chapbook me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun (2013), which won an Exploding Pinecone Prize from Button Poetry. Barnes’s first play, BLKS (2017), debuted at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. In poems and performances that interrogate and deconstruct assumptions around gender, race, and class, Barnes seeks to liberate and pluralize languages of identity. In an interview with Vice, Barnes declares, “Poems will not save your life. But what poems can do at best is provide you a roadmap so that you can save your life. They're just little maps. If you're listening to yourself—if you're trusting yourself.” A Callaloo fellow and member of the Dance Cartel and the Divine Fabrics collective, Barnes has been an editor at Kinfolks Quarterly and a cofounder of the Poetry Gods podcast. Their honors and awards include a Tangerine Award, an NYU Grey Art Gallery Prize for Radical Presence, and an Emerging Poets fellowship at Poets House. Barnes lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
Hilary Bettis writes plays, TV and movies. She is a two-time recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize from Lincoln Center and is a 2015 graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwright Fellowship at The Juilliard School. Bettis has received fellowships and residencies at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, 2050 Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop, John N. Wall Fellow at Sewanee Writers’ Conference, SPACE at Ryder Farm, Cape Cod Theatre Project, La Jolla Playhouse, New York Foundation for the Arts, Playwrights’ Week at The Lark, New Georges, Two River Theater, Great Plains Theatre Conference, The Kennedy Center/NNPN and a Sloan/EST Commission. Her plays have been recognized by The Kilroys every year since its inception. The Ghosts of Lote Bravo received a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere at the Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City, MO and Borderlands Theater in Tucson. Her play, Alligator, was produced Off-Broadway with New Georges and The Sol Project, and recieved a Drama Desk Nomination for Best Music in a Play. As a screenwriter, Bettis has written and produced two short films, B’Hurst and The Iron Warehouse, which have screened at multiple film festivals across the globe. Hilary is currently in her second season as Story Editor on FX's Emmy-Nominated show "The Americans. She has a TV series in development with FOX 21. She lives in Brooklyn, NY where she works as a staff writer for the TV series “The Americans” on FX.
JOCELYN IOH (Playwright) is a Ghanaian-American writer/performer from New York City. NYC acting credits include In the Blood (Signature Theatre, Drama Desk Nomination) , Everybody (Signature Theatre, Lortel nomination); Men On Boats (Playwrights Horizons); An Octoroon (Soho Rep); Neighbors (The Public Theater); and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time which won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2015. Her plays include 2015 Kilroys’ List selection Nollywood Dreams which was presented in 2017 as part of The Cherry Lane Mentor Project, School Girls; Or The African Mean Girls Play (MCC Theater, 2017/18, Lortel Award, OCC John Gassner Award, Hull-Warriner Award, Drama Desk Nomination, Drama League Nomination, Off Broadway Alliance Nomination, Kilroys’ List 2016), African Americans (Ruby Prize Finalist 2011), Goddess (book writer) and The Ladykiller’s Love Story of which she conceived the story and wrote the libretto with music/lyrics by Cee Lo Green. She is a commissioned playwright with Manhattan Theatre Club, Atlantic Theater Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Second Stage Theater. She is a resident playwright at Lincoln Center and is a Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence with MCC Theater for 2017–18. BA in English and Theatre from Ohio State University and MFA in Playwriting.
Eboni Booth is a writer and actress from New York City, where she is currently a playwriting fellow at Juilliard. Her play Paris will have its premiere as part of Atlantic Theater’s 2019/2020 season. Her work has been developed with Clubbed Thumb, Cape Cod Theater Project, Two River Theater, Northern Stage, and WP Theater. As an actress, some of Eboni’s credits include Dance Nation (Playwrights Horizons, Ensemble Drama Desk Award), After the Blast (LCT3/Lincoln Center), Fulfillment Center (Manhattan Theater Club), Sundown Yellow Moon (Ars Nova, WP), Ultimate Beauty Bible (Page 73), Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (Soho Rep.), The Cider House Rules (Atlantic Theater), and more. Her television appearances include “The Good Fight,” “The Americans,” “Instinct,” “Show Me a Hero” and “Daredevil.” Film credits include Larry (upcoming). Eboni is an alum of Clubbed Thumb’s Emerging Writers Group and Two River Theater’s Writers Group, and she is a graduate of the University of Vermont.
Charise Castro Smith returns to the Goodman, where her play Feathers and Teeth was featured as part of the 2013 and 2014 New Stages Festivals. Her plays include Estrella Cruz [The Junkyard Queen] (Ars Nova ANT Fest/Yale Cabaret/Upcoming: Halcyon Theatre); Boomcracklefly (Miracle Theater in Portland, OR) and The Hunchback of Seville (Brown Trinity Playwrights Rep/Washington Ensemble Theatre). She is currently working on commissions from Trinity Repertory Company, Soho Rep and the Humana Festival of New American Plays. As an actress, Ms. Castro Smith has appeared in Antony and Cleopatra (Royal Shakespeare Company/GableStage/The Public Theater) and on television in The Good Wife and Unforgettable. She is a member of New Georges’ the JAM and an alumna of Ars Nova’s Playgroup. Ms. Castro Smith was a 2012/2013 Van Lier Fellow at New Dramatists. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Drama and her BA from Brown University.
Eugenie Chan is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter whose work has been produced or developed across the United States, including at the Asian American Theater Company, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Centenary Stage, Crowded Fire, Cutting Ball, East West Players, Group Theater, Houston Grand Opera: HGOco, Magic Theatre, Ma-Yi, Northwest Asian American Theatre, Pan Asian Rep, Perishable, Playwrights Horizons, the Public, San Francisco Mime Troupe, and Thick Description. Her screenplays have been seen at the Asians on Film, Berlin, Big Apple, Cinestory, Dis-Orient, Mill Valley, San Diego Asian, and Toronto Independent Film Festivals. She teaches at the University of San Francisco's Performing Arts & Social Justice Department, is playwright emerita at Cutting Ball Theater, and an alumna of New Dramatists and the Playwrights Foundation. She is on the Advisory Board of the Kearny Street Workshop, the nation's oldest Asian American arts organization. B.A. Yale University; M.F.A. New York University, Tisch School of the Arts.
Christopher Chen is an international award-winning playwright whose plays have been performed across the United States and abroad. SELECTED PLAYS: The Hundred Flowers Project (the Glickman Award, James Tait Black Award shortlist), The Late Wedding, Mutt and Caught (NY Times Critics Pick, Barrymore Award, Drama League Nomination for Outstanding Broadway or Off-Broadway Production). HONORS: the 2017 Lanford Wilson Award; the 2015-2016 Sundance Institute/Time Warner Fellowship; the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, through which he was playwright in residence at The Vineyard; the Belarus Free Theater International Playwriting Competition (2nd Place); the Rella Lossy Playwriting Award. PUBLICATIONS: Theatre Bay Area, American Theater Magazine, Theater Magazine (Yale), Dramatists Play Service. UPCOMING: You Mean To Do Me Harm at San Francisco Playhouse; Antony and Cleopatra at Kansas City Repertory Theatre; A Tale of Autumn at Crowded Fire; and Passage at The Wilma. COMMISSIONS: American Conservatory Theatre, The Aurora, Crowded Fire, LCT3, Manhattan Theatre Club and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Chris is a founding member of 6NewPlays, and is currently the resident playwright at Crowded Fire. A San Francisco native, Chris is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, and holds an M.F.A. in playwriting from S.F. State.
Kristiana Rae Colón is a poet, playwright, actor, educator, Cave Canem Fellow, creator of #BlackSexMatters and co-director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective. She was awarded 2017 Best Black Playwright by The Black Mall. Past works include good friday (world premiere Oracle Productions, 2016), Octagon (world premiere Arcola Theatre, London, 2015; American premiere Jackalope Theatre, 2016), but i cd only whisper (world premiere Arcola Theatre, London, 2012; American premiere The Flea, New York, 2016). In 2013, she toured the UK for two months with her collection of poems promised instruments, winner of the inaugural Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize and published by Northwestern University Press. Kristiana is an alum of the Goodman Theatre's Playwrights Unit where she developed her play florissant & canfield, which debuted at University of Illinois-Chicago in February 2018. Her play Tilikum opened in June 2018 with Sideshow Theater and was the winner of Outstanding New Play at the ALTA Awards. She is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and one half of the brother/sister hip-hop duo April Fools. She appeared on the fifth season of HBO's Def Poetry Jam. Kristiana’s writing, producing, and organizing work to radically reimagine power structures, our complicity in them, and visions for liberation.
Jordan E. Cooper is an award-winning playwright who lives in Brooklyn and is currently obtaining his BFA degree at The New School For Drama. His play Ain’t No Mo’ recently premiered at the Public Theater. His last play Black Boy Fly was voted 'Best New Play' by BroadwayWorld.Com. He can be seen starring in the critically acclaimed feature film WOLF, which is now available on Amazon and iTunes. His musical Alice Wonder premiered in concert previously this year at 54 Below.
Fernanda Coppel is a playwright and a screenwriter. Her new play King Liz will have its world premiere at Second Stage Theatre this summer. Her play Chimichangas and Zoloft premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2012 and was published by Samuel French. In 2015, Fernanda recieved the inaugural Williamstown Theatre Festival New Play Comission. Her work has been developed at New York Theatre Workshop, Pregones Theater, INTAR Theatre, The Juilliard School, The Lark Development Center, the Flea, the Old Vic (London), Naked Angels, and at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Fernanda is a member of the MCC Playwrights' Coalition and was a member of the Old Vic's US/UK TS Eliot Exchange Program. Her work has won the Asuncion Queer Latino Festival at Pregones Theater, the 2012 HOLA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting, and the 2012 Helen Merrill Award. She was a three-year Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellow at The Juilliard School and received her MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU. Fernanda's television credits include "The Bridge" on FX and "Kingdom" on DIRECTV.
KIA CORTHRON's A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick premiered at Playwrights Horizons in spring 2010. Other plays include Moot the Messenger; Light Raise the Roof; Snapshot Silhouette; Slide Glide the Slippery Slope; The Venus de Milo Is Armed; Breath, Boom; Force Continuum; Splash Hatch on the E Going Down; Seeking the Genesis; Digging Eleven; Life by Asphyxiation; Wake Up Lou Riser; Come Down Burning; Cage Rhythm. Awards include the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Creative Arts Residency, McKnight National Residency, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Award for Excellence in the Arts, Barbara Barondess MacLean Foundation Award, AT&T On Stage Award, Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, Mark Taper Forum's Fadiman Award, NEA/TCG, Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, New Professional Theatre Playwriting Award, Callaway Award, Connections Contest winner, and in television a Writers Guild Outstanding Drama Series Award and Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Wire.
Inda Craig-Galván is a Chicagoan living in Los Angeles. Her plays have been developed and performed at Ojai Playwrights Conference, Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Oregon Shakespeare Festival Black Swan Lab, The Old Globe, San Francisco Playhouse, Playwrights' Arena, and others. Kesselring Prize, Jeffry Melnick New Playwright Award, Kilroys List, The Mix, Kennedy Center Rosa Parks Playwriting Award, Humanitas Play Prize, runner-up for the Princess Grace Playwriting Prize. MFA in Theatre, University of Southern California. www.indacraig-galvan.com
Cusi Cram: Selected productions of Cusi’s plays include: A Lifetime Burning (Primary Stages), Dusty and the Big Bad World (Denver Theater Center), Lucy and the Conquest (Williamstown Theater Festival), All the Bad Things (LAByrinth Theater Company at the Public Theater), Fuente (Barrington Stage), The End of it All (South Coast Repertory), Landlocked (Miranda Theater), Fuente Ovejuna: A Disloyal Adaptation (Lewis Center for the Arts), Radiance (LAByrinth Theater Company), and most recently, Camp Kappawanna with music by Lisa Loeb at the Atlantic Theater Company, which was a New York Times Critic's Pick. Her theater work has been supported with grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Herrick Theater Foundation, The Bogliasco Foundation, The Camargo Foundation, and The Stillpoint Fund. She has been commissioned by South Coast Repertory, The Atlantic Theater Company, The Actors Theater of Louisville, New Georges, LAByrinth Theater, and the Echo Theater Company. Her work has received significant developmental support from The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, New Georges, The Lark, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, INTAR, The New Group, and The Public Theater. Cusi has received three Emmy Award nominations for her extensive writing in children’s television. She was also a writer on the Showtime series “The Big C”, starring Laura Linney. She recently wrote, directed, and produced her first film, Wild & Precious, through a fellowship in conjunction with AFI’s Directing Workshop for women, where she was awarded the Adrienne Shelly Foundation and Nancy Malone Awards. Cusi is a founding playwright of the Obie-winning Fulcrum Theater, a member of LAByrinth Theater Company, and sits on New Georges’ Kitchen Cabinet and on the board of Leah’s FEWW (Fund for Emerging Women Writers) and the Lilly Awards. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard.
Nilo Cruz is a Cuban-American playwright and pedagogue. With his award of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play, Anna in the Tropics, he became the first Latino so honored (Royale Theatre) The play also won the American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg Award for Best New Play and has had over fifteen productions, both in the United States and the United Kingdom. Off-Broadway works include Beauty of the Father (N.Y.C. Center Stage), Two Sisters and a Piano (Public Theater), and Dancing On Her Knees (LuEsther Hall). Regional works include Bolero (Arena Stage), Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams (Burstein Family Stage), A Bicycle Country and A Park in Our House (Plaza Del Mar), Havana (Pasadena Playhouse), In Your Arms (Old Globe Theatre), Lorca in a Green Dress (Lincoln Square Theatre), Solso Voice (Historic Asolo Theatre), and The Color of Desire (Eugene O'Neill Theater).
Migdalia Cruz is an award-winning playwright and translator of more than 50 works including: El Grito Del Bronx, Two Roberts: a Pirate-Blues Project, Fur, and Miriam’s Flowers, which have been produced in venues as diverse as BAM, Classic Stage Company, Mabou Mines, National Theater of Greece/Athens, Old Red Lion/London, Houston Grand Opera, Ateneo Puertorriqueño, Teatro Vista, and Latino Chicago Theater Company (writer-in-residence from 1991 to 1998). She was nurtured by Sundance, is an alumna of New Dramatists, and was mentored by Maria Irene Fornés at INTAR where she is currently at work on Satyricoño 21. Migdalia was born and raised in the Bronx.
EISA DAVIS was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play Bulrusher. She wrote and starred in Angela’s Mixtape, named a best of 2009 by The New Yorker. Other plays include The History of Light, Paper Armor, Umkovu, Six Minutes, Warriors Don’t Cry, and Hip Hop Anansi. Eisa was a resident playwright at New Dramatists, where she won the Helen Merrill Award, and the Whitfield Cook Award, among others. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Cave Canem, and the Van Lier and Mellon Foundations. As an actor, recent work includes her Obie Award-winning performance in the Broadway rock musical Passing Strange, now a film directed by Spike Lee. Eisa is also featured in the films Welcome to the Rileys opposite James Gandolfini (Sundance), Robot Stories, The Architect, Confess, Happenstance, Pretty Bird, Apparition of the Eternal Church, and Brass Tacks. She was Bubbles’ sister on The Wire, a repeat offender on the Law and Order franchise, and has guest starred on Damages and Mercy. She was also in the world premiere of Melissa James Gibson’s THIS at Playwrights Horizons. Eisa is a member of the Actors Studio, and a Usual Suspect at New York Theater Workshop. As a singer-songwriter, her album Something Else is available through iTunes and CDBaby. She sings her original music at venues including Joe’s Pub, BAMCafé, Symphony Space, and the Whitney Museum.
Lydia R. Diamond is a member of the 2005-2007 cohort of Huntington Playwriting Fellows. Her most recent play, Smart People, was commissioned by the McCarter Theatre and had its world premiere at the Huntington in 2014. The Huntington’s 2010 hit production of her play Stick Fly produced in association with Arena Stage inspired the 2011 Tony Award-nominated Broadway production. Awards for Stick Fly include a 2012 Outer Circle Critics Award nomination for Best Play (Broadway), 2010 IRNE Award for Best Play, 2010 LA Critics Circle Award for Playwriting, 2010 LA Garland Award for Playwriting, 2009 LA Weekly Theatre Award for Playwriting, 2008 Susan S. Blackburn Finalist, 2006 Black Theatre Alliance Award, and 2006 Joseph Jefferson Award Nomination for Best New Work. Her other plays include Voyeurs de Venus (2006 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Work, 2006 BTAA for Best Writing); The Bluest Eye (2006 Black Arts Alliance Image Award for Best New Play, 2008 American Alliance for Theatre and Education Distinguished Play Award); The Gift Horse (2005 Theodore Ward Prize, Kesselring Prize – 2nd Place); Harriet Jacobs; and Stage Black. She was a 2005-2006 Harvard WEB Du Bois Institute non-resident Fellow, a 2007 TCG/NEA Playwright in Residence at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, a 2012-2013 Radcliffe Institute Fellow, a 2012 Sallie B. Goodman McCarter Fellow, and a 2012 Sundance Institute Playwright Lab Creative Advisor. She is currently a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and a playwright in residence at Arena Stage. Ms. Diamond is a graduate of Northwestern University where she majored in performance studies. She has an honorary doctorate of arts from Pine Manor College and was on faculty at Boston University.
Kristoffer Diaz returns to the Goodman, where his play The Upstairs Concierge ran during the 2013 New Stages festival. Mr. Diaz’s full-length plays include The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity (2011 New York Times Outstanding Playwright recipient, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Lucille Lortel Award, Obie Award, Drama Desk nominee and Jeff Award winner for Best Production and Best New Work), Welcome to Arroyo’s and #therevolution, among others. He is a playwright-in-residence at Teatro Vista, as well as a recipient of the Jerome Fellowship, the Future Aesthetics Artist Regrant and the Van Lier Fellowship (New Dramatists). Mr. Diaz is also a former member of the Ars Nova Play Group and is currently working on commissions for the Goodman/Teatro Vista and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Colman Domingo is a 2020 Julliard School Creative Associate, Colman Domingo is a Tony®, Lawrence Olivier, Drama Desk, Drama League and NAACP Theatre Award nominated, OBIE and Lucille Lortel Award winning actor, playwright, director and producer. He has been recently celebrated as a Newport Beach Film Festival’s Artist of Distinction and honored by The Vineyard Theatre for his thirty year body of work. Domingo’s hit Broadway musical Summer: The Donna Summer Musical was honored with two Tony® Award nominations as well as Drama Desk and Drama League. It kicked off its National Tour in Fall of 2019, and starts its Brazilian engagement in March 2020 in San Paulo. Domingo has written 7 plays and musicals, including A Boy and His Soul, Wild with Happy, and Dot. Dot is enjoying regional productions around the country and is published by Samuel French. He has directed for Berkeley Rep as well as Lincoln Center Director’s Lab. Colman has received residencies and/or commissions from The Geffen Playhouse, American Conservatory Theater, People's Light & Theatre Company, New York Theater Workshop, Scott Rudin Productions, Jeffrey Sellar, The Wallace Foundation, San Francisco Cash Fund, New Professional Theater and the March of Dimes. (colmandomingo.com
Larissa FastHorse is an award winning playwright, director, choreographer and performer based in Santa Monica. Larissa was awarded the PEN/USA Literary Award for Drama, NEA Distinguished New Play Development Grant, Joe Dowling Annamaghkerrig FellowshiAATE Distinguished Play Award, Inge Residency, Sundance/Ford Foundation Fellowship, Aurand Harris Fellowship, and numerous Ford and NEA Grants. Larissa's produced plays include The Thanksgiving Play, Cow Pie Bingo, Urban Rez, Native Nation, Landless, Average Family, Teaching Disco Squaredancing to Our Elders: a Class Presentation, and Cherokee Family Reunion. She has written commissions for Yale Rep, Cornerstone Theatre Company, Artists Rep Portland, Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, AlterTheater, Kennedy Center TYA, Native Voices at the Autry, Perseverance Theater Company and Mountainside Theatre. She developed plays with Kansas City Rep, Rep Portland, Arizona Theater Company, the Center Theatre Group Writer’s Workshop and Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor. She is a current member of the Playwrights' Center Core Writers, Playwright’s Union, Director’s Lab West 2015, Theatre Communications Group board of directors and is an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Sicangu Lakota Nation.
Marcus Gardley is a poet-playwright who has won the Helen Merrill Award (2008), a Kesselring honor, the Gerbode Emerging Playwright Award, a Eugene O'Neill Memorial Scholarship, and the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize. His recent play, And Jesus moonwalks the Mississippi, was produced at the Cutting Ball. He has had six plays produced including: This World in a Woman's Hands (2009), Love is a Dream House in Lorin (2007) and dance of the holy ghost (2005). His new play, Every Tongue Confess, will premiere at Arena Stage in November directed by Kenny Leon. MFA: playwriting, Yale Drama School. Member: New Dramatists. Currently professor of Playwriting and African-American studies at Umass Amherst.
Keelay Gipson is an Activist, Professor, and award-winning Playwright whose plays include imagine sisyphus happy (Finalist; Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, P73 Summer Residency at Yale University), #NEWSLAVES (Finalist; Princess Grace Award, Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Seven Devils Playwright Conference), CRH, or the placenta play (Semi-Finalist; The O’Neill, Bay Area Playwrights Conference, AADA Main Stage Live!), Nigger/Faggot (Downtown Urban Theater Festival), The Lost, Or How to Just B, What I Tell You in the Dark (Finalist; Premiere Stages), and Mary/Stuart, a dramatic queering of friedrich schiller's classic play (BAM Next Wave Festival, partnership with Wendy’s Subway and Lambda Literary). His work has been seen/developed at Victory Gardens, the Wild Project, Poetic Theater Productions, HERE Arts Center, The Theater at Alvin Ailey, Tom Noonan's Paradise Factory, Pace University, Planet Connections Theater Festivity, The University of Houston, The National Black Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights' Theater, The Fire This Time Festival, Classical Theater of Harlem, and New York Theatre Workshop. He is the recipient of New York Stage and Film’s Founders’ Award, the Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, as well as writing fellowships with Lambda Literary, The Amoralists, Page 73, Dramatist Guild Foundation and Playwrights’ Realm. He has held residencies with the MacDowell Colony, New York Stage and Film, the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of New York, and the Administration of Children’s Services of the City of New York.
Kirsten Greendidge's plays include ZENITH, BALTIMORE, MILK LIKE SUGAR, THE LUCK OF THE IRISH, SANS-CULOTTES IN THE PROMISED LAND, and BOSSA NOVA. Her work most of explores race, gender, class, and how these intersect in twentieth and twenty first century American society. Kirsten has enjoyed development experiences at the Family Residency at Space at Ryder Farm, Huntington Summer Playwrights Workshop, the O'Neill, Bay Area Playwrights, among others. Her work has been produced at MetroStage Company, La Jolla Playhouse, the Kennedy Center, LTC3 (Lincoln Center 3), Playwrights Horizons, The Huntington Theatre Company, Company One Theatre, Mosaic Theatre, Humana Festival/Actor's Theatre Of Louisville, and Yale Repertory Theatre. She is the proud recipient of an Obie Award (The Luck of the Irish), San Diego Critics Award, two Independent Reviewers of New England Awards, two Edgerton Awards, a former National Endowment for the Arts Residency Grant to work with Woolly Mammoth Theatre, a Lucille Lortel nomination recipient, and a past KC/ACTF Kennedy Center Lorraine Hansberry Award winner. Kirsten is currently working on two commissions from the Huntington, one of which is an adaptation of J. Anthony Lukas' Pulitzer Prize winning book COMMON GROUND, with director Melia Bensussen, as well as LITTLE BOAT, commissioned by Yale Rep, ROLL, BELINDA, ROLL, commissioned by Oregon Shakespeare's American Revolutions Project, BEACON, commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, and FOR THE GREATER GOOD, commissioned by Company One Theatre. Kirsten is part of the current 2016-2019 cohort of the Mellon Foundation National Playwright Residency Program administered in partnership with HowlRound. She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Boston University where she oversees the School of Theatre's Playwriting track of study for undergraduates.
Dipika Guha is an LA based, Calcutta - born playwright raised in Russia, India and the United Kingdom. Her plays include Yoga Play (South Coast Rep, Gateway, Moxie Theatre & SF Playhouse), The Art of Gaman (Theatre 503 London, Relentless Award semifinalist) and Unreliable (Kansas City Rep). Recent commissions include Azaan, a play for for Oregon Symphony, In Braunau for Playwrights Horizons Theatre School, contributions to You Across From Me (Humana, Actors Theatre of Louisville) and Getting There for New Conservatory Theatre Center. She is a current Venturous Fellow with the Lark for her play Passing, was a Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and was the inaugural Shakespeare’s Sister Playwriting Fellow. Dipika is currently under commission from South Coast Rep, Manhattan Theatre Club and Barrington Stage. For television, she’s written for projects in development at AMC the series Sneaky Pete & currently writes for Black Monday on Showtime. She earned her undergraduate degree at University College London, won a Frank Knox Fellowship to Harvard University and has an M.F.A from the Yale School of Drama under Paula Vogel.
Stephen Adly Guirgis graduated from University at Albany – SUNY and the William Esper Studio in New York City. He is a former Co-Artistic Director of LAByrinth Theatre Company in New York Cityand educator in New York City area prisons, schools, shelters, and hospitals for conflict resolution and HIV/AIDS prevention. Guirgis's plays have been performed throughoug the US and across 5 continents. He won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Between Riverside and Crazy. Awards include: the Lucille Lortel Award, the PEN/Laura Pels Award, the Yale Wyndham-Campbell Prize, The Harold & Mimi Steinberg Award, Whiting Award, TCG fellowship, Fringe First Award, NY Drama Critics Circle, and the L.A. Drama Critics Prize. He is also an actor and has appeared in theater, film, and television.
Danai Gurira is an award-winning playwright and actress. Danai’s play Familiar received its world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre directed by Rebecca Taichman. Her play The Convert, a historical drama set in Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe), received world premiere co-productions through McCarter Theater, the Goodman Theatre, and CTG’s Kirk Douglas Theatre, winning the Stavis Award, LA Drama Critics Award, and six Ovation Awards. Danai’s initial success was as the co-lead of In the Continuum, and she subsequently received a grant for research in Liberia which resulted in her second play, Eclipsed. As an actress, Danai currently stars as Michonne, one of the most popular characters in AMC’s critically-acclaimed original series “The Walking Dead.” Danai’s other film credits include Mother of George, The Visitor, 3 Backyards, and Restless City. Danai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and she is also the recipient of the prestigious Whiting Writers Award (2012). She is co-founder and President of Almasi, a Zimbabwean American Dramatic Arts Collaborative Organization. Danai was born in the US and raised in Zimbabwe by Zimbabwean parents. She holds an MFA from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.
Quiara Alegría Hudes is a writer, strong wife and mother of two, barrio feminist and native of West Philly, U.S.A. Hailed for her work’s exuberance, intellectual rigor, and rich imagination, her plays and musicals have been performed around the world. They include Water By the Spoonful, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; In the Heights, winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical and Pulitzer finalist; and Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, another Pulitzer finalist. Her most recent musical, Miss You Like Hell, appeared Off-Broadway at New York’s Public Theater. Hudes wrote the screenplay adaptation for In the Heights which releases in movie theaters Summer 2020. Originally trained as a composer, Hudes writes at the intersection of music and drama. She has collaborated with renowned musicians including Nelson Gonzalez, Michel Camilo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Erin McKeown, and The Cleveland Orchestra. Hudes recently founded Emancipated Stories. It seeks to put a personal face on mass incarceration by having inmates share one page of their life story with the world.
Katori Hall is a playwright/performer from Memphis, TN. Hall’s plays include: The Mountaintop (2010 Olivier Award for Best New Play), which recently ran on Broadway at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre starring Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson, Hurt Village (2011 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Signature Theatre), Children of Killers (National Theatre, UK and Castillo Theatre, NYC), Hoodoo Love (Cherry Lane Theatre), Remembrance (Women’s Project), Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, WHADDABLOODCLOT!!! (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Our Lady of Kibeho and Pussy Valley. Her awards include the Lark Play Development Center Playwrights of New York (PONY) Fellowship, the ARENA Stage American Voices New Play Residency, the Kate Neal Kinley Fellowship, two Lecomte du Nouy Prizes from Lincoln Center, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, a NYFA Fellowship, the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award and the Otis Guernsey New Voices Playwriting Award. Hall’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, UK’s The Guardian, Essence and The Commercial Appeal, including contributing reporting for Newsweek. The Mountaintop and Katori Hall: Plays One are published by Methuen Drama. Hall is an alumna of the Lark Playwrights’ Workshop, where she developed The Mountaintop, and a graduate of Columbia University, the A.R.T. at Harvard University, and the Juilliard School. She is a proud member of the Ron Brown Scholar Program, the Coca-Cola Scholar Program, the Dramatists Guild, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She is currently a member of the Residency Five at Signature Theatre Company in New York City.
Aleshea Harris’s play Is God Is (directed by Taibi Magar at Soho Rep) won the 2016 Relentless Award, an OBIE Award for playwriting in 2017, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award in 2019, was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and made The Kilroys’ List of “the most recommended un-and underproduced plays by trans and female authors of color” for 2017. What to Send Up When It Goes Down (directed by Whitney White, produced by The Movement Theatre Company), a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-blackness, had its critically-acclaimed NYC premiere in 2018, was featured in the April 2019 issue of American Theatre Magazine and was nominated for a Drama Desk award. Harris was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize in 2020. She has performed her own work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Orlando Fringe Festival, REDCAT, as part of La Fête du Livre at La Comèdie de Saint-Étienne and at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles. Harris is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and has enjoyed residencies at Hedgebrook and Djerassi.
Jeremy O. Harris: Full-length plays include: Slave Play (Broadway, New York Theatre Workshop, NYT Critics Pick, Winner of the 2018 Kennedy Center Rosa Parks Playwriting Award, the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, and The Lotos Foundation Prize in the Arts and Sciences), “DADDY” (Vineyard Theatre/The New Group, Almeida Theatre), Black Exhibition (Bushwick Starr), Xander Xyst, Dragon: 1, and WATER SPORTS; or insignificant white boys (published by 53rd State Press). His work has been presented or developed by Pieterspace, JACK, Ars Nova, The New Group, NYTW, Performance Space New York and Playwrights Horizons. In 2018, Jeremy co-wrote A24’s upcoming film Zola with director Janicza Bravo. He is the 11th recipient of the Vineyard Theatre’s Paula Vogel Playwrighting Award, a 2016 MacDowell Colony Fellow, an Orchard Project Greenhouse artist, a resident playwright with Colt Coeur, and is under commission from Lincoln Center Theater and Playwrights Horizons. Jeremy is a graduate of the Yale MFA Playwrighting Program. Jeremy is currently developing a pilot with A24 for HBO.
Amina Henry is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Productions include: Hunter John and Jane at JACK, Ducklings at JACK, The Animals at JACK, Happily Ever at Brooklyn College, An American Family Takes a Lover at Theater for the New City, Water produced by Drama of Works, The Minstrel Show, produced as part of the 2013 Bring a Weasel and a Pint of Your Own Blood Festival at 13th Street Theater/CSC (NYC), and Bully at Interrobang Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Mirror BoxTheatre, and SUNY Purchase. She is currently working on commissions from The New Group, HERO Theater, and Project Y Theatre. Her work has been developed by, produced, and/or presented at: The New Group, The Flea, Ars Nova, Clubbed Thumb, Page 73, National Black Theater, Barefoot Theater, Little Theater at Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, OR), Kitchen Dog Theater (Dallas, TX), Interrobang Theatre (Baltimore, MD), and Texas State University, among other theaters and venues. She has been a participant in Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writers group, Ars Nova’s 2017-2018 PlayGroup and Page 73’s Interstate 73 writers group and is currently a New George's Affiliate Artist. She was a 2017-2018 recipient of a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Space Grant and a 2018 Dixon Place Space Residency. Bully was on the 2015 Kilroy List and her play Burned was Honorable Mention for the 2016 Kilroy List. Upcoming: New Light Theater's production of The Great Novel, June 2019 at The Flea. For up-to-date information, go to aminahenry.wordpress.com.
JIRÉH BREON HOLDER is a Memphis, Tennessee native and proud Morehouse Man. He grew up obsessed with Toni Morrison, South Park, and Joseph Campbell. Funny enough, Sarah Ruhl's playwriting program at the Yale School of Drama was the perfect training ground. At Yale, JBH wrote several plays that merged the political with the poetic. His favorites were a one man show reflecting on the prison-industrial complex and an Afro Futurist clown show where six Black astronauts attempt to colonize space. For his professional debut, JBH returned to his Southern roots to tell a story blending Holder Family lore with the little known history of Nashville’s Freedom Riders. Too Heavy for Your Pocket won the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition and subsequently had an extended off-Broadway run at the Roundabout Theatre. Too Heavy for Your Pocket has been produced regionally in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago, Des Moines to Houston, and more. JBH expanded his craft to the small screen, joining the writing team of NBC's hit medical drama New Amsterdam. In "Happy Place" (Season 1, Episode 19), JBH turned his own story into art when a journalist attempts to blackmail Dr. Floyd Reynolds with a mugshot from his past. JBH was a recipient of the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award and 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, then honored as the Fellowship of Southern Writers' 2017 Bryan Foundation Award for Drama. In June 2020, ...what the end will be presented at the Roundabout Theater in New York.
Chisa Hutchinson (B.A. Vassar College; M.F.A NYU - Tisch School of the Arts) is a New York-based playwright and screenwriter. Most recently, her radio drama, Proof of Love, was presented by Audible and New York Theatre Workshop at the Minetta Lane Theater in NYC and can now be found on Audible's digital platform. Chisa’s happily presented her other plays, which include Dirt Rich, She Like Girls,This Is Not The Play, Sex On Sunday, Tunde’s Trumpet, The Subject, Somebody’s Daughter, Alondra Was Here, Surely Goodness And Mercy, From The Author Of, Amerikin and Dead & Breathing at such venues as the Lark Theater, SummerStage, Atlantic Theater Company, Mad Dog Theater Company, Rattlestick Theater, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the Contemporary American Theater Festival, the National Black Theatre, Writers’ Theatre of New Jersey, Delaware REP, Second Stage Theater and Arch 468 in London. She has been a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a Lark Fellow, a Resident at Second Stage Theater, a Humanitas Fellow, a New York NeoFuturist, and a staff writer for the Blue Man Group. Chisa has won a GLAAD Award, a Lilly Award, a New York Innovative Theatre Award, the Paul Green Award, a Helen Merrill Award, the Lanford Wilson Award, and has been a finalist for the highly coveted PoNY Fellowship. Currently, in addition to being a Fellow at Primary Stages and a proud but panicked seventh-year member of New Dramatists, Chisa is working on a bigger, blacker, better musical adaptation of Oliver Twist with Disney and muhfuggin' Ice Cube. To learn more, visit www.chisahutchinson.com.
David Henry Hwang’s stage works includes the plays M. Butterfly, Chinglish, Yellow Face, Kung Fu, Golden Child, The Dance and the Railroad, and FOB, as well as the Broadway musicals Elton John & Tim Rice’s Aida (co-author), Flower Drum Song(2002 revival) and Disney’s Tarzan. Hwang is a Tony Award winner and three-time nominee, a three-time OBIE Award winner, and a three-time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the most-produced living American opera librettist, whose works have been honored with two Grammy Awards, co-wrote the Gold Record Solo with the late pop icon Prince, and worked from 2015-2019 as a Writer/Consulting Producer for the Golden Globe-winning television series The Affair. He is currently writing the live-action musical feature film The Hunchback of Notre Dame for Disney Studios and a movie to star actress Gemma Chan. Hwang serves on the Board of the Lark Play Development Center, as Head of Playwriting at Columbia University School of the Arts, and as Chair of the American Theatre Wing, founder of the Tony Awards. M. Butterfly recently returned to Broadway in a revival directed by Julie Taymor, which marked Mr. Hwang’s eighth Broadway production. His newest work, Soft Power, a collaboration with composer Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home), premiered at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre, where it won six Ovation Awards. Its subsequent run at the Public Theatre in NYC received four Outer Critics Honors, eleven Drama Desk Nominations, and was a Finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
NAOMI IIZUKA’s plays include 36 VIEWS, POLAROID STORIES, ANON(YMOUS), LANGUAGE OF ANGELS, ALOHA, SAY THE PRETTY GIRLS, TATTOO GIRL, SKIN, AT THE VANISHING POINT, CONCERNING STRANGE DEVICES FROM THE DISTANT WEST, LAST FIREFLY, CITIZEN 13559, and WAR OF THE WORLDS (a collaboration with Anne Bogart and SITI Company.) Her plays have been produced at theatres across the country including Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Goodman, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, the Guthrie Theatre, Cornerstone, Children’s Theater Company, the Kennedy Center, the Huntington Theater, Portland Center Stage, the Public Theatre, Campo Santo + Intersection for the Arts, Dallas Theatre Center, Seattle Children’s Theatre, and Soho Rep. Her play GOOD KIDS was the first play commissioned by the Big Ten Consortium’s New Play Initiative and has since been produced at universities across the nation. Most recent projects include an adaptation of SLEEP, a short story by Haruki Murakami, in collaboration with the ensemble theatre group Ripe Time which was produced at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the Annenberg Center, and Yale Rep’s No Boundaries series, and WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, a play written in collaboration with USMC veterans and their families, produced by La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls and Cornerstone Theater Company. Iizuka’s plays have been published by Overlook Press, Playscripts, Smith and Kraus, Dramatic Publishing, and TCG. lizuka was named the Berlind Playwright-in-Residence at Princeton University. She is an alumna of New Dramatists and the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Award, an Alpert Award, a Joyce Foundation Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Stavis Award from the National Theatre Conference, a Rockefeller Foundation MAP grant, an NEA/TCG Artist in Residence grant, a McKnight Fellowship, a PEN Center USA West Award for Drama, a Hodder Fellowship, and a Jerome Fellowship.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ plays include Everybody (Signature Theater), Neighbors (Public Theater), An Octoroon (Soho Rep, OBIE Award for Best New Play), Appropriate (Signature Theater, OBIE Award for Best New Play, Outer Critics Circle nominee), Gloria (Vineyard Theater, 2015) and War (Yale Rep, forthcoming). His plays have been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center Theatre/LCT3, Soho Rep, the Public Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Actors Theater of Louisville, Center Theatre Group, Victory Gardens Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theater, The Matrix Theater, CompanyOne, Theater Bielefeld in Germany and the HighTide Festival in the UK. He is currently a Residency Five playwright at Signature Theatre and master-artist-in-residence in the Playwriting MFA program of Hunter College, City University of New York. Other honors include a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, the Paula Vogel Award, a Fulbright Arts Grant, a Helen Merrill Award, the Dorothy Strelsin playwriting fellowship, and the inaugural Tennessee Williams Award. He is a Princeton alum from the Class of 2006, holds an M.F.A. in Performance Studies from NYU and is a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard.
Obehi Janice is an award-winning writer, actress and comedian whose multi-genre work spans from stage to screen. She is a member of the 2018-19 Emerging Writers Group at The Public Theater, a Luminary Artist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and a past recipient of a TCG Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowship as well as a Creative Residency at SPACE on Ryder Farm. Her plays include Ole White Sugah Daddy, Era Era, Selah, African Tea, along with one-woman shows FUFU & OREOS and Obehi Janice: Casanova. An alum of Georgetown University, Obehi’s work has been featured in American Theatre Magazine, NPR, and For Harriet, among other publications. Originally from Lowell, Massachusetts, Obehi splits time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, where she is currently a staff writer on HULU’s Castle Rock. She recently joined The Kilroys, an advocacy group for gender parity in the theatre.
C.A. Johnson hails from Metairie Louisiana, but currently lives and writes in Queens, NY. Her plays include ALL THE NATALIE PORTMANS (MCC Theater), THIRST (2017 Kilroys List,The Contemporary American Theater Festival), THE CLIMB (Cherry Lane Mentor Project), AN AMERICAN FEAST (NYU Playwrights Horizons Theater School), and I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW. She is currently the Tow Playwright in Residence at MCC Theater and a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center. She was previously the 2018 P73 Playwriting Fellow, The Lark's 2016-17 Van Lier Fellow, a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a member of The Civilians R&D Group, a member of The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, a Sundance/Ucross Fellow and a 2018 Sundance Theatre Lab Fellow. Her work has been developed with The Lark, PlayPenn, Luna Stage, Open Bar Theatricals, The Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation, and The Fire This Time Festival. BA: Smith College MFA: NYU
Rajiv Joseph’s play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama and also awarded a grant for Outstanding New American Play by the National Endowment for the Arts. He has twice won the Obie Award for Best New American Play, first in 2016 with Guards at the Taj (also a 2016 Lortel Winner for Best Play) and then, in 2018, for Describe the Night. Other plays include Archduke, Gruesome Playground Injuries, Animals Out of Paper, The Lake Effect, The North Pool, and Mr. Wolf. Joseph has been awarded artistic grants from the Whiting Foundation, United States Artists and the Harold & Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust. He is a board member of The Lark in New York City, where he develops all his plays. He served for three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal and now lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Hansol Jung is a playwright and director from South Korea. Productions include Cardboard Piano (Humana Festival at Actors Theater of Louisville), Among the Dead (Ma-Yi Theatre Company), No More Sad Things (co-world premiere at Sideshow Theatre, and Boise Contemporary Theatre), Wolf Play (Artists Repertory Theatre) and Wild Goose Dreams (La Jolla Theater and The Public Theater). Commissions from Playwrights Horizons, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Artists Repertory Theater, the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation grant with Ma-Yi Theatre and a translation of Romeo and Juliet for Play On! at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her work has been developed at the Royal Court, New York Theatre Workshop, Berkeley Repertory’s Ground Floor, Sundance Theatre Lab, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Lark Play Development Center, Salt Lake Acting Company, Boston Court Theatre, Bushwick Starr, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Asia Society New York, and Seven Devils Playwright Conference. She is the recipient of the Page 73 Playwright Fellowship, Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop Fellowship at the Lark, 2050 Fellowship at New York Theater Workshop, MacDowell Colony Artist Residency, and International Playwrights Residency at Royal Court. She has translated over thirty English musicals into Korean, including Evita, Dracula, Spamalot, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, while working on several award winning musical theatre productions as director, lyricist and translator in Seoul, South Korea. Jung holds a Playwriting MFA from Yale School of Drama, and is a proud member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab.
ADITI BRENNAN KAPIL is a writer, actress, and director, of Bulgarian and Indian descent. She was raised in Sweden, and resides in Minneapolis, MN. She performs extensively around the country, and her writing has been produced nationally to critical acclaim. Her play “Love Person” received the 2009 Stavis Playwriting Award, and her play, “Agnes Under the Big Top, a tall tale”, was selected as a Distinguished New Play Development project by the NEA as administered by Arena Stage. Her most recent work is the Displaced Hindu Gods Trilogy, consisting of the plays “Brahman/i, a one-hijra stand-up comedy show”, “The Chronicles of Kalki”, and “Shiv”. Aditi is currently working on commissions with Yale Repertory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, South Coast Repertory Theatre, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is the Mellon Playwright-in-Residence at Mixed Blood Theatre, an artistic associate at Park Square Theatre, a Core Writer at The Playwrights’ Center, and a Resident Writer at New Dramatists.
Nambi E. Kelley has penned plays for Steppenwolf, Goodman Theatre, and Court Theatre/American Blues Theater in Chicago, Lincoln Center in New York, and internationally. Most recently, Kelley was named playwright in residence at the National Black Theatre in New York. Her adaptation of Native Son, directed by Seret Scott, will be published by Sam French, 2016. Native Son was presented to critical acclaim at Court Theatre with American Blues Theatre (co-production) was recently nominated for 5 Jeff Awards including best adaptation and production of the year, and was the highest grossing production in Court Theatre's 60 year history. Native Son is also on the Kilroy's List 2015, in the top 7 % of new plays by female and trans* authors nominated by literary managers, directors, and other artists polled across the country. Kelley’s Xtigone celebrated production in Chicago (Chicago Danz Theatre Ensemble), San Francisco (African American Shakespeare Company directed by Rhodessa Jones), and was just published by YouthPlays Publishing. Kelley recently returned to Singapore to perform in her co-adaptation of The Book of Living and Dying that was published in an anthology of plays in Singapore in 2014, is working on several commissions with productions slated in 2016. Nambi is also a professional actress, most recently closing the critically acclaimed Two Trains Running at the Goodman Theatre, and has been seen on television in Person of Interest, Madam Secretary, Elementary, and Chicago PD. Nambi has a BFA from The Theatre School at DePaul University, and an MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College. www.nambikelley.com
Sylvia Khoury is a New York-born writer of French and Lebanese descent. Her plays include Selling Kabul (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival), Power Strip (LCT3), Against the Hillside (Ensemble Studio Theater) and The Place Women Go. She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center and Williamstown Theater Festival. Awards include the L. Arnold Weissberger Award and Jay Harris Commission and a Citation of Excellence from the Laurents/Hatcher Awards. She is a member of EST/ Youngblood and a previous member of the 2018-2019 Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop at The Lark and the 2016-2018 WP Lab. Her plays have been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival, Eugene O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, Roundabout Theater Underground, Lark Playwrights’ Week, EST/Youngblood, and WP Theater. She holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the New School for Drama. She is a fourth-year student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Young Jean Lee is a writer, director, and filmmaker who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed ten shows in New York with Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, and toured her work to over thirty cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group, Samuel French, and Dramatists Play Service. She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and has written a screenplay commission for Plan B/Paramount Pictures. Her first short film, Here Come the Girls, was presented at The Locarno International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and BAMcinemaFest, and she has released an album with her band, Future Wife.Lee is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN Literary Award, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Doris Duke Artist Residency, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, and the ZKB Patronage Prize of the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
Mike Lew’s plays include Teenage Dick (Donmar Warehouse, Wooly Mammoth, Ma-Yi at the Public, and Artists Rep productions; Public Studio, O’Neill, OSF workshops), Tiger Style! (Olney, Huntington, La Jolla Playhouse, and Alliance productions; O’Neill and CTG workshops), Bike America (Ma-Yi and Alliance productions), microcrisis (Ma-Yi, InterAct, and Next Act productions), Moustache Guys, and the book to the musical Bhangin’ It (Richard Rodgers Award; La Jolla Playhouse, Jerome Robbins Project Springboard and Rhinebeck Writers Retreat "Triple R" workshops). He is a Tony voter, Dramatists Guild Council member, and resident of New Dramatists. He is a Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Ma-Yi and former La Jolla Playhouse Artist-in-Residence (both with Rehana Lew Mirza). Honors include Lark Venturous and NYFA fellowships and the PEN Emerging Playwright, Lanford Wilson, Helen Merrill, Heideman, and Kendeda awards. He is former co-director of Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the largest collective of Asian-American playwrights in the country. He is married to fellow playwright Rehana Lew Mirza, who he met in Ma-Yi Lab. Training: Juilliard (2013), Yale (2003).
PATRICIA IONE LLOYD is a 2017 Playwrights Realm fellow and a 2016 Sundance fellow for her play Eve’s Song, She is a 2017 New Georges fellow and a 2017 Dramatist Guild fellow for her musical Household Magic. Lloyd is a 2016 fellow – New York Theater Workshop. 2015 fellow – Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater. She was a resident playwright at the University of Mumbai, Brown University (through the Africana Studies Department/Rites and Reasons Theatre) and the International Theatre and Literacy Project in Tanzania. Her work has been developed by The Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, Sundance, Labrinth Theater, Red Bull Theatre, Dixon Place, Classical Theatre of Harlem, Luna Stage, Downtown Urban Theatre Festival, New York LGBTQ Center, Freedom Train Productions, Fire This Time Festival, Bleecker Street Theatre, and Rising Circle Theatre. Lloyd is the recipient of New Professional Theatre’s Emerging Playwright Award for her play Black Tale, and the best play award from DUTF for her play This Train is Bound for Glory. She was a writer on the AMC television show Hap and Leonard.
Melinda Lopez has appeared at the Huntington numerous times as an actress including in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (2019), Yerma (2019),and Mala (2018) (which she also wrote) and as Mrs. Gibbs in Our Town. She was playwright-in-residence at the Huntington from 2013-2019. The Huntington also produced her plays Becoming Cuba (2014) (also at North Coast Repertory Theatre) and Sonia Flew (2004) also at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Laguna Playhouse, San Jose Repertory Theatre, among others. Her play Mala (2018) (also produced at ArtsEmerson and Guthrie Theatre) earned the 2017 Elliot Norton Award of Best New Play and an Arts Impulse Award for Best Solo Performance. It is available on Audible. Ms. Lopez is a 2019 Mass Cultural Council Fellow in dramatic writing and is the recipient of the 2019 Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence.
Matthew Lopez is the author of The Whipping Man, one of the most widely produced new American plays of the last several years. The play premiered at Luna Stage in Montclair, NJ and debuted in New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club. The production was directed by Doug Hughes and starred Andre Braugher. The sold-out production extended four times, ultimately running 101 performances off-Broadway and garnering Obie and Lucille Lortel Awards. Matthew was awarded the John Gassner New Play Award from the New York Outer Critics Circle for the play. Since then, it has received over 40 productions worldwide. His play Somewhere has been produced at the Old Globe, TheatreWorks in Palo Alto and most recently at Hartford Stage Company, where his play Reverberation received its world premiere in 2015. His newest play, The Legend of Georgia McBride, premiered earlier this year at the Denver Theatre Center for the Performing Arts. His play The Sentinels premiered in London at Headlong Theatre Company in 2011. Matthew currently holds new play commissions from The Roundabout Theatre Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, Hartford Stage, and South Coast Rep. Matthew was a staff writer on HBO’s The Newsroom and is currently adapting Javier Marias’ trilogy Your Face Tomorrow for the screen.
Donja R. Love is an Afro-Queer playwright, poet, and filmmaker from Philadelphia. He writes specifically about Black and Queer folx, for Black and Queer folx. He's the recipient of the 2018 Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award, the 2017 Princess Grace Playwriting Award. He’s the Lark's 2016 Van Lier New Voices Playwriting Fellow, The Playwrights Realm’s 2016/2017 Writing Fellow, and the 2011 Philadelphia Adult Grand Slam Poetry Champion. His work has been developed at Manhattan Theatre Club, Rising Circle Theatre, The Lark, and The Playwrights Realm. He's the cohost of OffBook, theater's only Black podcast; and he’s the co-founder of The Each-Other Project, an organization that helps build community and provide visibility, through art and advocacy, for LGBTQ People of Color. Select stage plays include: The Love* Plays, and soft.
Tarell Alvin McCraney is the Chair, and Professor in the Practice of Playwriting at the School of Drama; and is the Yale Repertory Theatre Playwright-in-Residence. He is also a member of Teo Castellanos/D-Projects Theater Company in Miami, a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Ensemble, and co-wrote the 2016 film Moonlight, based on his own work In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, for which he received an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His numerous awards include the Whiting Award, Steinberg Playwright Award, Doris Duke Artist Award, Windham-Campbell Prize, London Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright, New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award, the Paula Vogel Award, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship.
Rehana Lew Mirza holds a shared Mellon National Playwrights residency at Ma-Yi Theater with husband Mike Lew. She is also currently a Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop Fellow at the Lark and the recipient of a 2016 Lilly Award (Stacey Mindich commission.) Full-length plays include: Hatefuck (production: WP Theater. Primary Fresh Ink reading); Soldier X (productions: Ma-Yi, Brooklyn College. NYSCA Commission, Lark Studio Retreat, Kilroy selection.); Neighborhood Watch (NNPN/InterAct commission); Lonely Leela (productions: Desipina; LPAC. readings: Magic Theatre, New Georges); Barriers (productions: Desipina; Asian American Theater Company); and if it’s sad i don’t want to see it (readings: Queens Theater, 2G). Honors include: Rhinebeck Musical Theater Residency (with composer Sam Willmott and co-writer Mike Lew for Bhangin’ It); TCG Future Leader Fellowship with New Georges; NBC Shorts Audience Award; E.S.T. Sloan Commission; La Jolla Playhouse Commission (with Mike Lew); Tofte Artist residency; IAAC residency with the Lark, John Golden Award, and a LMCC artist grant. She is a current member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and the Primary Stages Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group. MFA: Columbia University; BFA: NYU Tisch.
Mona Mansour’s play WE SWIM, WE TALK, WE GO TO WAR will premiere at SF’s Golden Thread in fall 2018, directed by Evren Odcikin. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY will premiere at Mosaic Theater in D.C. in June 2018, directed by Mark Wing-Davey. The trilogy was presented at New Dramatists in fall 2016 after a workshop at the Vineyard Arts Project with the Public Theater. Of the trilogy: THE HOUR OF FEELING (directed by Wing-Davey) premiered at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and a new Arabic translation was presented at NYU Abu Dhabi, as part of its Arab Voices Festival in 2016. URGE FOR GOING: productions at Public LAB (directed by Hal Brooks), and Golden Thread (directed by Odcikin). THE VAGRANT, the third play in the trilogy, was commissioned by the Public and workshopped at the 2013 Sundance Theater Institute. THE WAY WEST received its NY premiere at Labyrinth Theater in April 2016, directed by Mimi O’Donnell. Prior to that, the play was at Steppenwolf (directed by Amy Morton) and Marin Theatre Company (directed by Hayley Finn). Other credits: UNSEEN, Gift Theater in Chicago, spring 2017 (directed by Maureen Payne-Hahner) and IN THE OPEN, for Waterwell, directed by James Dean Palmer. Mona is a member of New Dramatists, and was a member of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group and a Core Writer at Minneapolis’ Playwrights’ Center. With Tala Manassah she has written FALLING DOWN THE STAIRS, an EST/Sloan commission. Their short play DRESSING is part of FACING OUR TRUTHS: Short Plays about Trayvon, Race and Privilege, a collection of plays commissioned by the New Black Festival. TV credits: QUEENS SUPREME, DEAD LIKE ME. Commissions include Playwrights Horizons, Old Globe Theater, La Jolla Playhouse and Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “American Revolutions.” 2012 Whiting Award. 2014 Middle East America Playwright Award, monamansour.com
LIZ MORGAN is a writer and performer best known for her poem “Why I was Late Today and will Probably Always Be Late as as Black Woman” (Huffington Post). She has previously developed stage work with SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Fire This Time Festival, The Lark, Fresh Ground Pepper, The Mitten Lab, Judson Arts, Liberation Theatre Company, Amios, Rising Circle Theatre Collective, Quick Silver Theatre Company, JACK, The Parsnip Ship, NY Madness, POTPOURRI! World Women Works Series, Rites and Reason Theatre, Make/Shift, Manhattan Rep and National Black Theatre where she was named a finalist for the I AM SOUL Playwrights’ Residency. Other theatrical honors include the 2017 Torchbearer for Black Theatre Award, Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship (Semi-Finalist) and the New Works Lab at Stratford (Semi-Finalist). Liz is a staff writer on the BRIC TV show, Sauce, and Official Selection for the 2019 Seattle International Film Festival and the 2019 Hip Hop Film Festival. She is a writer in residence at The Flea where she contributes to their late night show, SERIALS as well as their immersive cabaret, Flea Fridays. Liz holds an M.F.A. in Acting from Brown/Trinity Rep where she was the recipient of the Davis Wickham Prize for Excellence in Playwriting. See www.LizMorganOnline.com for more.
Dominique Morisseau is the author of The Detroit Project (A 3-Play Cycle) which includes the following plays: Skeleton Crew (Atlantic Theater Company), Paradise Blue (Signature Theatre), and Detroit ’67 (Public Theater, Classical Theatre of Harlem and NBT). Additional plays include: Pipeline (Lincoln Center Theatre), Sunset Baby (LAByrinth Theatre); Blood at the Root (National Black Theatre) and Follow Me To Nellie’s (Premiere Stages). She is also the TONY nominated book writer on the new Broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations (Imperial Theatre). Dominique is alumna of The Public Theater Emerging Writer’s Group, Women’s Project Lab, and Lark Playwrights Workshop and has developed work at Sundance Lab, Williamstown Theatre Festival and Eugene O’Neil Playwrights Conference. She most recently served as Co-Producer on the Showtime series “Shameless” (3 seasons). Additional awards include: Spirit of Detroit Award, PoNY Fellowship, Sky-Cooper Prize, TEER Trailblazer Award, Steinberg Playwright Award, Audelco Awards, NBFT August Wilson Playwriting Award, Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama, OBIE Award (2), Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, Variety’s Women of Impact for 2017-18, and a recent MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow.
A native of Houston, Texas, Janine Nabers is a 2013 graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellowship at Juilliard and winner of the 2014 Yale Drama Series Prize for her play “Serial Black Face.” She currently writes for Lifetime’s “Unreal” and Bravo’s “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce” under Marti Noxon. Her play “Annie Bosh is Missing” premiered in August 2013 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Janine won the 2013 NYFA Playwriting fellowship and was the 2013-2014 AETNA Playwriting Fellow at Hartford Stage, a 2012-2013 New York Theatre Workshop Playwriting Fellow, and Page 73’s 2011 Playwriting Fellow. Janine is working on commissions from Primary Stages, the Alley Theatre, and Hartford Stage. Her new musical “Mrs. Hughes” was developed as the 2012 Williamstown Theatre Festival fellowship musical and was part of the 2013 Yale Institute for Musical Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club’s 7@7 series, and the Theatreworks New Works Now Festival.
Leah Nanako Winkler is from Kamakura, Japan, and Lexington, Kentucky. Her plays include KENTUCKY (2015 Kilroys List, World Premiere with EST & Page 73), DEATH FOR SYDNEY BLACK (TerraNova Collective dir. Kip Fagan, 2014, and 2015 Kilroys honorable mention), THE INTERNET (Incubator Arts Project), HAPPY DANCE DANCE PRINCESS SHOW (The Brick), DOUBLE SUICIDE AT UENO PARK!!! (35th Marathon of One-Act Plays at Ensemble Studio Theatre), TWO MILE HOLLOW, THIRTY-SIX, COPE, and DIVERSITY AWARENESS PICNIC. With playwright Teddy Nicholas, she co-wrote FLYING SNAKES IN 3-D!!!, which enjoyed performances in 2011-2012 at Ars Nova (ANT Fest), the Brick Theater (mainstage), and the New Ohio Theatre (Ice Factory 2012). Leah’s work has been developed at Playwrights Horizons/Clubbed Thumb, Page 73, New Georges, New York Theatre Workshop, the Bushwick Starr, and the Flea Theatre, as well as venues in Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Florida. She has performed short experimental work all throughout the city at places like Little Theatre at Dixon Place, Prelude Festival, Bowery Poetry Club, and more. She is a current member of Youngblood and the Dorothy Strelsin New American Playwrights Group, an alumnus of Terra Nova Collective’s Groundbreakers Playwright Group, an affiliated artist at New Georges, a 2013 Playwright in Residence with the New Group/Urban Arts Initiative, a two time recipient of the NYU’s A/P/A commission for researching and writing about hapaidentity, and one of her essays was a part of the exhibition "Visible & Invisible" at the Japanese American National Museum in 2013. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Brooklyn College.
Don Nguyen: Full length plays include: Red Flamboyant (World Premiere – Firebone Theatre Company 2015, 2015 GAP Prize Winner, Ojai Playwrights Conference, O’Neill finalist), Sound (Azeotrope/ACT, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Playwrights Realm Fellowship, Princess Grace Award finalist), The Commencement of William Tan (Yale Cabaret), The Man From Saigon (developed at A.C.T SF, Naked Angels, NYSAF), The Supreme Leader (developed at Roundabout, Labyrinth Theatre, and Ma-Yi) and Hello, From the Children of Planet Earth (developed at Ma-Yi, The Playwrights Realm). Don’s work has been developed or produced at The Public Theater, Roundabout Theatre Company, Labyrinth Theatre, The Flea, Ojai Playwrights Conference, New York Stage & Film, Naked Angels, Naked Radio, The Civilians, Ma-Yi Theatre, The Playwrights Realm, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Joe’s Pub, The 52nd Street Project, SPACE on Ryder Farm, and Tofte Lake. Don is the recipient of the 2015 GAP Prize from the Aurora Theatre and New York Stage & Film Founder’s award and has been a finalist for The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Princess Grace Award, Woodward International Playwriting Prize, and New Dramatists. Nominations include: the Laurents/Hatcher award and the L. Arnold Weissberger Award. Don is a proud member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, the Public Theater’s inaugural Emerging Writers Group, The Civilians inaugural R&D Group, the 52nd Street Project, and a co-founder of Mission to (dit)Mars, a Queens based theatre arts collective.
Qui Nguyen is a playwright, television and film writer, and co-founder of the Obie Award-winning Vampire Cowboys of NYC. Scripts include Vietgone (2016 Steinberg Award, 2016 LADCC Ted Schmidt New Play Award, 2016 Kennedy Prize Finalist); Poor Yella Rednecks; She Kills Monsters (2013 AATE Distinguished Play Award); Soul Samurai (2009 GLAAD Media Award nom); Begets; Krunk Fu Battle Battle; and the critically acclaimed Vampire Cowboys productions of The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G, Alice in Slasherland, Fight Girl Battle World, Men of Steel, and Living Dead in Denmark. For television/film, Qui’s written for AMC, SYFY, PBS, Netflix, and Marvel Studios. He currently writes for Walt Disney Animation Studios. Notable honors include a 2016 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Preschool Animated Program (Peg+Cat), a 2015 NY Community Trust Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, and a 2014 Sundance Institute/Time Warner Fellowship. He’s currently under commission by South Coast Repertory/Manhattan Theatre Club (The Vietgone Saga), Geffen Playhouse, Center Theatre Group/Goodman Theatre, Atlantic Theater Company, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He is a proud member of the WGA, The Dramatists Guild, The Playwrights Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and an alumnus of New Dramatists and Youngblood.
Ana Nogueira is a writer and actress based out of Brooklyn. In 2015, her play Empathitrax received its world premiere production with the critically- acclaimed theater company Colt Coeur. Her otherplays include whatever she wants and Untitled Sloan Play 5th Draft. Her work has been developed at South Coast Rep, Second Stage, The New Group, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Barrington Stage and Ensemble Studio Theater. She is a recipient of a Sloan Grant for playwriting, and the Elizabeth George Emerging Playwright commission. Ana co-wrote and starred in the short film “We Win,” which premiered at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival, and won Best Screenplay at the Rhode Island Film Festival. Acting credits include Engagements, Mala Hierba (both at Second Stage), Bump (Ensemble Studio Theater), Knives and Other Sharp Objects (The Public, LAByrinth) and the upcoming Starz series “Hightown,” set to premiere in 2020. She is a proud alumni of The Boston Conservatory of Music and the Obie Award-winning playwriting group Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theater.
Lynn Nottage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter. Her plays include: Sweat (Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, Ruined, Intimate Apparel, Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine, Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por’knockers; and POOF!. Nottage is the recipient of a PEN/Laura Pels Master Dramatist Award, Doris Duke Artist Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, Steinberg "Mimi" Distinguished Playwright Award, Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award, the inaugural Horton Foote Prize, Obie Awards, Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award, NY Drama Critics' Circle Awards, Outer Critics Circle Award, Audelco Awards, Lilly Award, Helen Hayes Award, Lee Reynolds Award, NBT Fest's August Wilson Playwriting Award and a Guggenheim Grant. She's a member of The Dramatists Guild and the WGAE.
Antoinette Nwandu is a New York-based playwright via Los Angeles. Her play Breach will receive a World Premiere at Victory Gardens Theater in February 2018. She is currently under commission from Echo Theater Company in Los Angeles. Antoinette’s plays have been supported by the Cherry Lane Mentor Project (mentor: Katori Hall), the Kennedy Center, Page73, Ars Nova, PlayPenn, Southern Rep, The Flea Theater, Naked Angels, Fire This Time and The Movement Theater Company. Honors include a spot on the 2016 Kilroys list, the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, the Negro Ensemble Company’s Douglas Turner Ward Prize and a Literary Fellowship at the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Antoinette is an alum of the Ars Nova Play Group, the Naked Angels Issues PlayLab and the Dramatists Guild Fellowship. Additional honors include being named a Ruby Prize finalist, PONY Fellowship finalist, Page73 Fellowship finalist, NBT’s I Am Soul Fellowship finalist and two-time Princess Grace Award semi-finalist. Antoinette is a graduate of Harvard University, The University of Edinburgh and Tisch School of the Arts.
Robert O’Hara: Playwrights Horizons: Bootycandy (writer and director), Bella: An American Tall Tale (director). He has received the NAACP Best Director Award, the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, two Obie Awards, and the Oppenheimer Award. He directed the world premieres of Nikkole Salter and Danai Gurira’s In the Continuum, Tarell McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays (Part 2), Colman Domingo’s Wild With Happy, as well as his own plays, Bootycandy and Insurrection: Holding History. He has also written Zombie: The American (Wooly Mammoth) and Barbecue (The Public Theater).
Dael Orlandersmith was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Drama Desk Award nominee for Outstanding Play and Outstanding Actress in a Play for Yellowman. Ms. Orlandersmith is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, The Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2005 PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for a playwright in mid-career. She is the recipient of a Lucille Lortel Foundation Playwrights Fellowship and an Obie Award for Beauty’s Daughter. She has toured with the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Real Live Poetry) throughout the world and has had plays produced at the McCarter, the Wilma, New York Theatre Workshop, and Manhattan Theatre Club. Orlandersmith won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for The Gimmick in 1999. Works Include: Liar, Liar (1994); Beauty's Daughter (1995); Monster (1996); The Gimmick (1999); Yellowman (2002); Raw Boys (2005); Stoop Stories (2008); Bones (2010); Horsedreams (2011); Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men (2012); Forever (2014-2015)
A. Rey Pamatmat’s plays include: after all the terrible things I do (Huntington, Milwaukee Rep, About Face), Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them (Humana Festival, Company One, Steinberg/ATCA New Play Citation, GLAAD and Lambda Nominee), and House Rules (Ma-Yi). He is currently working on Safe, Three Queer Plays a cycle that follows the recent seismic changes in Queer America through a gay man of color’s romantic and artistic life. His short works appeared in 59E59’s Summer Shorts 2016, New Black Fest’s Facing Our Truth, The Mysteries at The Flea, Keen Teens, Actors Theatre of Louisville’s New Play Project, and two Humana Festival anthologies. Other productions: Thunder Above, Deeps Below (Second Generation), A Spare Me (Waterwell), DEVIANT (Vortex), High/Limbo/High (HERE). Publication: Samuel French, Playscripts, Cambria Press, Vintage. Awards: ’12/’13 Hodder Fellowship, ’11/’12 PoNY Fellowship, Princess Grace Award and Special Projects Grant, NYFA Playwriting Fellowship, E.S.T./Sloan Grant. Rey is Co-Director of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and teaches at Primary Stages ESPA and SUNY Purchase. BFA: NYU, MFA: Yale School of Drama.
Jiehae Park's plays include peerless (Yale Rep premiere, upcoming at Primary Stages), Hannah and the Dread Gazebo (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Here We Are Here (Sundance, Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor, Princess Grace WIP @ Baryshnikov Arts Center), The Aves (Alley All-New, McCarter Spotlight Festival), contributions to Wondrous Strange (Humana/ATL), and the book for the upcoming musical Kill the Boyband. Development: Soho Rep Writer-Director Lab, the Public’s Emerging Writers Group, p73, Playwrights Horizons, CTG Writers Workshop, Atlantic, PlayCo, Old Globe, Dramatists Guild Fellowship, Ojai Conference, BAPF, and the amazing Ma-Yi Writers Lab. Awards: Leah Ryan, Princess Grace, Weissberger, ANPF Women’s Invitational. Commissions: Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, Geffen, OSF, MTC/Sloan. Residencies: MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, McCarter/Sallie B. Goodman. As a performer, she most recently appeared in Celine Song’s ENDLINGS (NYTW, ART), and Ripe Time/Naomi Iizuka's adaption of Murakami's SLEEP (BAM Next Wave, Yale Rep) . TV writing: Marvel's RUNAWAYS; currently developing a new show with Diana Son for Tomorrow Studios/Apple. She is a NYTW Usual Suspect, Lincoln Center Theater New Writer in Residence, former Hodder Fellow, current New Dramatist, and 2019-20 Tow Playwright-in-Residence at Primary Stages. BA, Amherst; MFA, UCSD.
Suzan-Lori Parks: Named among Time magazine’s “100 Innovators for the Next Wave,” Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most acclaimed playwrights in American drama today. She is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, is a MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient, and in 2015 was awarded the prestigious Gish Prize for Excellence in the Arts. Other grants and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is also a recipient of a Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. She is an alum of New Dramatists and of Mount Holyoke College. Parks’ project 365 Days/365 Plays (where she wrote a play a day for an entire year) was produced in over 700 theaters worldwide, creating one of the largest grassroots collaborations in theater history. Her other plays include: Topdog/Underdog (2002 Pulitzer Prize winner); The Book of Grace; Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Musical; In the Blood (2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist); Venus (1996 OBIE Award); The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (1990 OBIE Award, Best New American Play) ; The America Play and Fucking A. Her adaptation of The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess won the 2012 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical. Her newest plays, Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3)—set during the Civil War—was awarded the Horton Foote Prize, the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama as well as being a 2015 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.
Ming Peiffer is a playwright/screenwriter from Columbus Ohio. Her play USUAL GIRLS (NY Times Critic’s Pick) received it’s World Premiere Production at Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City in November 2018. The twice-extended SOLD OUT production garnered rave reviews.Her work has been developed and/or presented by New York Theatre Workshop, Roundabout Theatre, The Kennedy Center, Ensemble Studio Theater, HERE Arts Center, The Flea, The Wild Project, New Ohio, Soho Playhouse, The Gene Frankel Theater, C.O.W., Theater for the New City, FringeNYC, Horsetrade Theater, Yangtze Repertory, among others. Awards/fellowships include: 2017 Kilroy’s List (USUAL GIRLS), Relentless Award Honorable Mention (USUAL GIRLS), NYTW 2050 Fellowship, The Kennedy Center's Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award Recipient (i wrote on ur wall and now i regret it), The Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center NPC Finalist (USUAL GIRLS), Playwright's Realm Fellowship Semi-Finalist, Princess Grace Award Semi-Finalist (i wrote on ur wall and now i regret it), Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award Finalist. Ming was a Guest Artist at The Lincoln Center Director's Lab and a 2012-2013 Member of NPTC's Women's Work Project. She has training from both the Stella Adler School of Acting and the Shanghai Theatre Academy where she lived abroad studying Traditional Peking Opera. She studied poetry at The New School and holds a BA with Honors in both Theater Arts and Mandarin Chinese from Colgate University. MFA: Columbia University ('16). In TV, Ming has been a staff writer on shows at Netflix and Hulu and is currently in development for an original series with Color Force and F/X. Additionally, she is adapting Weike Wang's "CHEMISTRY" into a film for Amazon and the graphic novel "The Divine" into a series for AMC.
CHRISTINA QUINTANA (CQ) is a queer writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. CQ's plays and musicals have been developed and produced with companies including Barrington Stage Company, Southern Rep, INTAR, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Lark Play Development Center, Astoria Performing Arts Center, and the Alliance Theatre, among others. Her play Scissoring is available for licensing via Dramatists Play Service. For more, visit NPX. Her poetry, fiction, and lyric nonfiction is published in Boudin: The Online Home of the McNeese Review, P.S. I Love You, PulpMag, OnCuba, Nimrod International Journal, Foglifter Journal, and beyond, and forthcoming in great weather for MEDIA, and The Punch Magazine. Her poem "She-lium" was featured on Radiolab's "Elements" episode in collaboration with Emotive Fruition. This past year, CQ's hour-long dystopian drama pilot, Invisible Lily, appeared on the WeForShe "Ones to Watch" List, and she served as Staff Writer on the ABC series The Baker and the Beauty. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from WP Theater, MacDowell (Ernest and Red Heller Fellow), Playwrights Realm, Van Lier/New Voices at The Lark, CubaOne, Queer/Art, and Lambda Literary, as well as commissions from The Civilians, Palo Alto Playhouse, EST/Alfred P. Sloan Project, Peppercorn Theatre Company, and more. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.
Heather Raffo is an award-winning playwright and actress whose work has been seen Off-Broadway, off West End, in regional theater and in film. She is the author and solo performer of the play 9 Parts of Desire (Lucille Lortel Award, Susan Smith Blackburn commendation, Drama League, Outer Critics Circle, Helen Hayes nominations), which The New Yorker called “an example of how art can remake the world.” The play ran Off-Broadway for nine months and has played across the U.S. and internationally for over a decade. Current productions in Greece, Hungary and India. Raffo’s libretto for the opera FALLUJAH was part of Kennedy Center’s International Theater Festival, received its world premiere at Long Beach Opera and opened at New York City Opera in 2016. Heather’s newest play, Noura, just won Williamstown’s prestigious Weissberger Award. Noura was further developed at Georgetown University’s LAB for Global Performance and Politics with refugee and Middle East policy experts. Further workshops were supported by the McCarter Theater, Epic Theater Ensemble and our nation’s first Arab-American Museum in Dearborn, MI. Noura is currently receiving its world premiere at Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC before a production in Abu Dhabi. Raffo is the recipient of multiple grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
José Rivera is a recipient of two Obie Awards for playwriting for Marisol and References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, which were both produced by The Public Theater in New York. His plays, Cloud Tectonics (Playwrights Horizons and Goodman Theatre), Boleros for the Disenchanted (Yale Repertory Theatre and Goodman Theatre), Sueño (Manhattan Class Company), Sonnets for an Old Century (The Barrow Group), School of the Americas (The Public Theater), Massacre (Sing to Your Children) (Rattlestick and Goodman Theatre), Brainpeople (ACT, San Francisco), Adoration of the Old Woman (INTAR) and The House of Ramon Iglesia (Ensemble Studio Theatre), have been produced across the country and around the world. He is currently working on The Last Book of Homer, Scream for the Lost Romantics, and The Gamma Forest. Mr. Rivera’s screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2005. His screenplay based on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and was distributed nationally in the winter of 2013. His film Trade was the first film to premiere at the United Nations. Television projects in the works include an untitled HBO pilot, co-written and produced by Tom Hanks, as well as a 10-hour series for HBO tentatively known as Latino Roots. Celestina, based on his play Cloud Tectonics, will mark his debut as a feature film director. He is the writer/director of the short film Lizzy and has recently completed his first novel, Love Makes the City Crumble. His next film project will be a biography of famed baseball player Roberto Clemente for Legendary Films.
Tori Sampson a native of Boston, MA is proud to be from “The City of Champions” and even prouder to be a human rights activist and Black Woman storyteller. By introducing her daughter to the genius that was Carroll O’Connor, Tori’s mother opened her eyes to the art and power of comedy for “goodness sake”. And it was on and poppin’ from there. Today, Tori focuses her imagination on creating comedies for the stage. Her plays include If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must be a Muhfucka (Playwrights Horizons, 2019), This Land Was Made (Vineyard Theatre, 2018), and Cadillac Crew (Yale Repertory Theater, 2019). Her plays have been developed at Great Plains Theatre Conference, Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s The Ground Floor residency program, Victory Garden’s IGNITION Festival of New Plays, Playwrights Foundation, Ubuntu Festival and Vineyard Theater. Tori is a 2017–18 Playwright’s Center Jerome Fellow and a 2018-19 Mcknight Fellow. Two of her plays appeared on the 2017 Kilroys List. Her awards and honors include the 2016 Relentless Award, Honorable Mention; the 2016 Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting from The Kennedy Center; the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, Second Place; the Alliance Theater’s 2017 Kendeda Prize, Finalist; the 2018 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Finalist. Tori is currently working on commissions from Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, and Atlantic Theater Company. She holds a BS in sociology from Ball State University and an MFA in playwriting from Yale School of Drama. Tori’s life goals include: A weekly lunch appointment with Julia Roberts, to be Michelle Obama’s “god-daughter” and to write an episode of Grey’s Anatomy before Grey Sloan closes its doors.
Tanya Saracho was born in Sinaloa, México. She is a playwright and television writer who’s worked on How To Get Away With Murder and HBO’s Looking, among other shows. Currently, she serves as the creator and show-runner of the series Vida on Starz. She is also developing a television series called Brujas with Big Beach, which deals with the intersection between Brujería culture and feminism. Named Best New Playwright by Chicago Magazine, Saracho has had plays produced at: Dallas Theater Center, Victory Gardens Theatre, Theatreworks, Primary Stages and 2nd Stage in NYC, Denver Theatre Center, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, Teatro Vista, Teatro Luna, Fountain Theater, Clubbed Thumb, NEXT Theater, and 16th Street Theater. Saracho was named one of nine national Latino Luminarios by Café magazine and given the first Revolucionario Award in Theater by the National Museum of Mexican Art. She is the founder of Teatro Luna (all-Latina theater company) as well as the founder of ALTA (Alliance of Latino Theatre Artists). She is currently under commission with South Coast Repertory Theatre and Two River Theatre.
Alexis Scheer is a writer, actor, and producer, named Rising Theatre Star by the Improper Bostonian in the Boston’s Best Issue and one of Remezcla’s 8 Exciting Latinx Playwrights. Plays: Our Dear Dead Drug Lord (WP Theater/Second Stage, NYT Critic’s Pick, Kilroy’s List, LTC Carnaval of New Latinx Work finalist, Relentless Award semifinalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival finalist), Laughs in Spanish (Kennedy Center’s Harold & Mimi Steinberg National Student Playwriting Award), Christina (Roe Green Award), and The Sensational (Actors’ Theatre of Louisville). She is currently working on commissions for Manhattan Theatre Club and Second Stage. Her work has been developed at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, McCarter Theatre Center, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Cleveland Playhouse, San Diego REP, and more. Alexis’ favorite acting credits include the Boston premiere of Blasted, a storefront Equus, and a regional production of Fiddler on the Roof she did when she was 13 instead of getting Bat Mitzvah’ed (true story). She also moonlights as the Producing Artistic Director of award-winning fringe company, Off the Grid Theatre. Alexis is a proud Miami native and New World School of the Arts alum, and holds a BFA in Musical Theatre from The Boston Conservatory and MFA in Playwriting from Boston University.
Betty Shamieh is the author of fifteen plays. Her off-Broadway premieres include The Black Eyed (New York Theatre Workshop, Director: Sam Gold) and Roar (The New Group, Director: Marion McClinton). Roar was selected as a New York Times Critics Pick and is currently being taught at universities throughout the United States. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Drama and Performance Art. She is a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship. She was selected as a winner of The Playwrights' Center’s McKnight National Residency and Commission. Shamieh was named a UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue in 2011. Her European productions in translation are Again and Against (Playhouse Theater, Sweden), The Black Eyed (Fournos Theatre, Greece), and Territories (European Union Capital of Culture Festival). Shamieh wrote and co-starred in her play of monologues, Chocolate in Heat (Director: Sam Gold), in two sold-out off-off-Broadway runs and over twenty university theatres. As Soon As Impossible was developed with Jamie Farr and commissioned by Second Stage through the Time Warner Commissioning Program. The Machine (Director: Marisa Tomei) was produced by Naked Angels at the Duke Theatre in 2007. She began performing in work-in-progress presentations of The Alter-Ego of an Arab-American Assimilationist (a performance art-lecture) at colleges in 2014. Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies presented the world premiere of a suite of arias from Territories, an opera based on her play. She was commissioned by Denison College to co-write the lyrics and libretto of Malvolio, a sequel to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night based on her play. Fit for a Queen had world premiere at the Classical Theatre of Harlem in October 2016 (Director: Tamilla Woodard). In 2017, the New York premiere of her immersive murder mystery The Strangest (Director: May Adrales) was selected as one of the season’s “most promising live events” in the New York Times Spring Arts Preview article, “32 Reasons to Get Out & Get Off the Couch.” Shamieh’s work has been the subject of features in the New York Times, Time Out, American Theatre magazine, Theater Bay Area, the Brooklyn Rail, San Francisco Chronicle, Svenska Dagbladet, Teaterstockholm, der Standard, Aramco Magazine, Kathimeiri, and the International Herald Tribune among others. A cartoon of Roar appeared in the New Yorker’s “Goings on about Town” section. A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, Shamieh was awarded an NEA/TCG grant to be a playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre. Shamieh was selected as a Clifton Visiting Artist at Harvard and named as a Playwriting Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Shamieh has taught playwriting at Columbia/Barnard, Denison College, and Marymount Manhattan College. She is a member of New Dramatists. an affiliated artist at the New Group, and a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect. Her works have been translated into seven languages
Madhuri Shekar is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. She was born in California and grew up in India, and is currently based in Jersey City. She is an alum of the Juilliard Playwriting program, a fellow at New Dramatists, and the 2020 winner of the Lanford Wilson Playwriting award. Her audio play EVIL EYE debuted on the Audible best-seller list in May 2019, and won the 2020 Audie Award for Best Original Work. Her play HOUSE OF JOY received its world premiere at Cal Shakes in August 2019. Her new play DHABA ON DEVON AVENUE was slated to premiere at Victory Gardens in April 2020, and is postponed till we emerge into a new post-pandemic life. Her other plays include QUEEN (2019 New York Innovative Theatre Awards, Outstanding Original Full Length Script; Edgerton New Play Award), IN LOVE AND WARCRAFT (Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Award), A NICE INDIAN BOY, ANTIGONE: PRESENTED BY THE GIRLS OF ST. CATHERINE’S and the TYA play BUCKET OF BLESSINGS (Suzi Bass Award for Outstanding Original Work – TYA). Her plays have also been developed or showcased at Center Theatre Group, the Old Globe, the Kennedy Center, the Hedgebrook Playwrights Festival, South Coast Repertory, the Movement Theater Company, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ma-Yi Theatre, NY Stage & Film, and Juilliard. She has an MFA in Dramatic Writing from USC, and a dual Master’s degree in Global Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and USC. She is an alumna of the Ma-Yi writers lab and the Center Theatre Group Writers Workshop, and a co-creator of the Shakespearean web series, TITUS AND DRONICUS. She was a staff writer for the upcoming HBO show The Nevers, and her feature film adaptation of Evil Eye is currently in post-production.
Jackie Sibblies Drury is a Brooklyn-based playwright. Her critically acclaimed play Fairview premiered this past summer at Soho Rep. Other plays include We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915, Really, and Social Creatures. Drury's plays have been presented by New York City Players and Abrons Arts Center, Soho Rep, Victory Gardens, Trinity Rep, Woolly Mammoth, Undermain Theatre, InterAct Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Company One, and The Bush Theatre in London, among others. Her work has been developed at The Bellagio Center, Sundance, The Ground Floor, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ars Nova, A.C.T., The Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, NYTW, PRELUDE, The Bushwick Starr, and The MacDowell Colony. Drury is a NYTW Usual Suspect, a United States Artists Gracie Fellow, has received a Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, a Jerome Fellowship at The LARK, a Windham-Campbell Literary Prize in Drama, and is a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
Charly Evon Simpson’s plays include Jump, Scratching the Surface, form of a girl unknown, it’s not a trip it’s a journey, and more. Her work has been seen and/or developed with Ensemble Studio Theatre, Ars Nova, The Lark, Page 73, Chautauqua Theater Company, Salt Lake Acting Company, National New Play Network through its NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwrights Workshop and National Showcase of New Plays, and others. Jump is receiving a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere with productions at PlayMakers Repertory Company (Chapel Hill, NC), Milagro Theatre in a co-production with Confrontation Theatre (Portland, OR), Shrewd Productions (Austin, TX), and Actor’s Express (Atlanta, GA) in 2019. Behind the Sheet is premiering at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City this January. She’s currently a member of WP Theater’s 2018-2020 Lab, The New Georges Jam, The Amoralists 18/19 ‘Wright Club and she’s The Pack’s current playwright-in-residence. Charly is a former member of SPACE on Ryder Farm’s The Working Farm, Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers’ Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood, and Pipeline Theatre Company’s PlayLab. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at SUNY Purchase. BA: Brown. MSt: University of Oxford, New College. MFA: Hunter College. www.charlyevonsimpson.com
Charise Castro Smith returns to the Goodman, where her play Feathers and Teeth was featured as part of the 2013 and 2014 New Stages Festivals. Her plays include Estrella Cruz [The Junkyard Queen] (Ars Nova ANT Fest/Yale Cabaret/Upcoming: Halcyon Theatre); Boomcracklefly (Miracle Theater in Portland, OR) and The Hunchback of Seville (Brown Trinity Playwrights Rep/Washington Ensemble Theatre). She is currently working on commissions from Trinity Repertory Company, Soho Rep and the Humana Festival of New American Plays. As an actress, Ms. Castro Smith has appeared in Antony and Cleopatra (Royal Shakespeare Company/GableStage/The Public Theater) and on television in The Good Wife and Unforgettable. She is a member of New Georges’ the JAM and an alumna of Ars Nova’s Playgroup. Ms. Castro Smith was a 2012/2013 Van Lier Fellow at New Dramatists. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Drama and her BA from Brown University.
Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author. She is credited with having created a new form of theater. Smith's work combines the journalistic technique of interviewing her subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. President Obama awarded Smith the National Humanities Medal in 2013. Additional honors include the prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for achievement in the arts, the George Polk Career Award in Journalism, two Tony nominations and several honorary degrees. She was runner up for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Smith has created over fifteen one-person shows based on hundreds of interviews. Her most recent play, Notes from the Field, looks at the vulnerability of youth, inequality, the criminal justice system, and contemporary activism. The New York Times named it among The Best Theater of 2016 and Time magazine named it one of the Top 10 Plays of that year. In 2018, HBO premiered the film version of Notes from the Field. Smith’s play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 was recently named one of the best plays of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times. Smith currently co-stars on the television series “For the People” and appears on the hit show “Black-ish”. Previously she appeared in “Nurse Jackie” and “The West Wing”. Films include The American President, Philadelphia and Rachel Getting Married. She is a University Professor at Tisch School of the Arts and the founding director of the NYU Institute in the Arts and Civic Dialogue.
CELINE SONG's play ENDLINGS received its world premiere in 2019 at American Repertory Theater, and it had its New York premiere in 2020 at New York Theatre Workshop. It has been named a finalist for the 2020 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and it was selected for the 2018 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. The play was also included on the 2017 Kilroys list. Celine is a member of the Public Theater’s 2016-2017 Emerging Writers Group, Ars Nova’s 2014-2015 Play Group, and The Orchard Project's inaugural NYC Greenhouse 2018. She was a Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow from 2017-2018, a 2014 & 2016 Great Plains Theatre Conference Playwright, and she was a 2017 semifinalist for the P73 Playwriting Fellowship. Her play TOM & ELIZA was a semifinalist for the American Playwriting Foundation's 2016 Relentless Award. Celine has been awarded residencies, fellowships, and commissions from MTC/Sloan, Sundance, the Millay Colony for the arts, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. She holds an M.F.A. from Columbia. Celine was a staff writer on Amazon's THE WHEEL OF TIME.
Susan Soon He Stanton is a playwright, television writer, and screenwriter in New York, originally from the consonant-free town of Aiea, Hawai‘i. Plays include we, the invisibles (Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival), Today Is My Birthday (Page73), Both Your Houses (ACT New Strands/ Crowded Fire), Takarazuka!!! (Clubbed Thumb and East West Players), Cygnus (WP Theater Pipeline), Solstice Party! (Live Source), The Things Are Against Us (Washington Ensemble Theatre), Navigator (Honolulu Theatre for Youth), The Underneath (Kumu Kahua Theatre), Art of Preservation (The Flea, Kumu Kahua), and more. She is an inaugural recipient of the Venturous Playwrights Fellowship with the Lark, and an inaugural recipient of the Lark’s Van Lier Fellowship. She is a two-time Sundance Institute’s Theater Lab Resident Playwright. Writing groups and residencies past and present include New Dramatists, Playwrights Center Core Writer Fellowship, the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group at Primary Stages, Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group, SoHo Rep Writer-Director Lab, The Women’s Project Lab, P73’s Interstate 73, Berkeley Rep Ground Floor, MaYi Playwrights Lab, The Civilians R&D Group, Hedgebrook, One Coast Collaboration (2x), and Terra Nova GroundBreakers. Writing groups at the Lark include Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop, New York Stage & Film (3x), Winter Writers’ Retreat (2x), Playground (3x). Awards and honors include Leah Ryan FEWW, Kilroys’ List 2015-2017, Southern Rep’s Ruby Prize Runner-up, Susan Glaspell Prize Finalist, a Susan Smith Blackburn nomination, Po’okela Award for best new play, and a NET Partnership Grant with Satori Group. From Kumu Kahua Theatre, she has received four playwriting awards, Hawai’i Prize and Resident Prize.
Caridad Svich received a 2018 Tanne Foundation Award, the 2018 Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre from ATHE (Association of Theatre in Higher Education), a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize. Among others, she is co-author of Fifty Playwrights on Their Craft (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2017), and editor of Stages of Resistance: Theatre and Politics in the Capitalocene (NoPassport Press, 2018) and Audience Revolution (TCG, 2017). She is currently working on a seven-play cycle called American Psalm, which includes Red Bike, Fuel, Hurt Song, Holler River, Life Jacket, Arbor Falls, and Trouble in Kind. Website: www.caridadsvich.com
Mfoniso Udofia's plays, Sojourners, runboyrun, Her Portmanteau, and In Old Age have been seen at the American Conservatory Theater [A.C.T.], New York Theatre Workshop [NYTW], The Playwrights Realm, Magic Theater, National Black Theatre, Strand Theater Company, and Boston Court. She’s the recipient of the 2017 Helen Merrill Playwright Award, the 2017-18 McKnight National Residency and Commission at The Playwrights’ Center and is a member of the New Dramatists class of 2023. Mfoniso is currently commissioned by A.C.T., Hartford Stage, Denver Center, A.C.T., Roundhouse, and South Coast Repertory. Her plays have been developed by Manhattan Theatre Club, A.C.T., NYTW, The Playwrights Realm, McCarter Theatre, OSF, New Dramatists, PCS’s JAW Festival, Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor, The OCC, Hedgebrook, Sundance Theatre Lab, Space on Ryder Farm, Page 73, New Black Fest, Rising Circle and more. She has worked as a television writer on the third season of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why and the first seasons of both Apple TV's Little America and Pachinko. As an actress, she recently appeared off-Broadway in Ngozi Anyanwu's, The Homecoming Queen. She's also appeared in the feature film, Fred Won't Move Out.
Pia Wilson is a 2017 NJPAC Stage Exchange commissioned playwright, 2017 resident with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Process Space program, 2015 Sundance fellow, and a recipient of the 2014 Sarah Verdone Writing Award. She is a 2012-2013 resident with LMCC's Workspace program, a member of the 2008 Emerging Writers Group at The Public Theater, and a 2009 playwriting fellow with the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She is also a member of The Passage Theatre Play Lab and a member of the 2009 Project Footlight team of composers and librettists. Her drama, TURNING THE GLASS AROUND was produced by Work/Space Productions in October 2014 and her play, GENERATION T, was produced at Adelphi University in February 2014. Her full-length play, THE FLOWER THIEF, was an August 2012 co-production between Horse Trade Theater Group and The Fire This Time play festival. Her play, GENERATION T, was featured in The Classical Theatre of Harlem's Future Classics reading series in June 2012. Her full-length drama, RED ROOSTER, was likewise a part of the Future Classics reading series as well as the Emerging Writers Spotlight Series at The Public Theater in 2009. ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS was featured in The Looking Glass Theatre's Spring 2009 Writer/Director Forum. THE RIVER PURE FOR HEALING was part of the 2008 Resilience of the Spirit play festival. Her play, TREE OF LIFE, received a 2007 workshop production at The Red Room Theater. In 2003, Pia's short story, Dressed In Your Dreams, was published by The Summerset Review. The following year, a short film she penned, Blinding Goldfish, debuted at the New Zealand Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. It was also shown at the Pan-African Film Festival in Los Angeles and the Trenton Film Festival in New Jersey.
Tracey Scott Wilson currently writes for The Americans on FX and previously wrote for Do No Harm on NBC. Recent productions include Buzzer at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, the Public Theater in NYC, and the Guthrie Theater and Pillsbury House Theater in Minneapolis. Additional productions: The Good Negro and The Story at The Public Theater/NYSF as well as the Goodman Theater; Order My Steps for Cornerstone Theater’s Black Faith/AIDS project in Los Angeles; and Exhibit #9, which was produced in New York City by New Perspectives Theatre and Theatre Outrageous; Leader of the People produced at New Georges Theatre; two ten-minute plays produced at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis; a ten minute play produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Tracey has had readings at the New York Theatre Workshop, Second Stage Theatre, The Public Theatre, Williamstown Theater Festival and Soho Theatre Writers Centre in London. She earned two Van Lier Fellowships from the New York Theatre Workshop, a residency at Sundance Ucross and Sundance Theatre Laboratory is the winner of the 2001 Helen Merrill Emerging Playwright Award, the 2003 AT&T Onstage Award, the 2004 Kesserling Prize, the 2007 Weissberger Playwriting Award as well as the 2007 Time Warner Storytelling Fellowship. In 2009, she was the writer-in-residence at the O’Neill National Playwriting Conference. She has taught and guest lectured at several schools including, Brown University, Yale University, Rutgers University and NYU. The Story and The Good Negro have been published by Dramatists Play Service. Ms. Wilson holds a Master’s degree in English Literature from Temple University.
Lauren Yee is a playwright born and raised in San Francisco. She currently lives in New York City. Her CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND, with music by Dengue Fever and others, premiered at South Coast Rep, with subsequent productions at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, Victory Gardens, City Theatre, Merrimack Rep, Signature Theatre, Portland Center Stage, and Jungle Theatre. Her play THE GREAT LEAP has been produced at Denver Center, Seattle Rep, Atlantic Theatre, Guthrie Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre, Arts Club, InterAct Theatre, and Steppenwolf, with future productions at Long Wharf, Cygnet Theatre, and Asolo Rep/Miami New Drama. Lauren Yee’s play KING OF THE YEES premiered at The Goodman Theatre and Center Theatre Group, followed by productions at ACT Theatre, Canada’s National Arts Centre, and Baltimore Center Stage. Other plays include CHING CHONG CHINAMAN (Pan Asian Rep, Mu Performing Arts), THE HATMAKER’S WIFE (Playwrights Realm, Moxie, PlayPenn), HOOKMAN (Encore, Company One), IN A WORD (Young Vic, SF Playhouse, Cleveland Public, Strawdog), SAMSARA (Victory Gardens), THE SONG OF SUMMER (Trinity Rep, Mixed Blood), and THE TIGER AMONG US (Mu). She is the winner of the Doris Duke Artist Award, the Steinberg Playwright Award, the Horton Foote Prize, the Kesselring Prize, the ATCA/Steinberg Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters literature award, and the Francesca Primus Prize. She has been a finalist for the Edward M. Kennedy Prize and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her plays were the #1 and #2 plays on the 2017 Kilroys List. Lauren is a Residency 5 playwright at Signature Theatre, New Dramatists member (class of 2025), Ma-Yi Writers’ Lab member, former Princeton University Hodder fellow, and Playwrights Realm alumni playwright. TV: PACHINKO (Apple), SOUNDTRACK (Netflix). Current commissions include Geffen Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Center Stage, Second Stage, South Coast Rep. BA: Yale. MFA: UCSD. www.laurenyee.com
Chay Yew's plays include PORCELAIN, A LANGUAGE OF THEIR OWN, RED, WONDERLAND, QUESTION 27 QUESTION 28, A DISTANT SHORE 17, and VISIBLE CITIES. His other work includes adaptations, A WINTER PEOPLE (based on Chekhov’s THE CHERRY ORCHARD) and Lorca's THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA, a musical LONG SEASON and theatre works, VIVIEN AND THE SHADOWS, HOME: PLACES BETWEEN ASIA AND AMERICA, and A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY. His work has been produced at the Public Theater, Mark Taper Forum, Manhattan Theatre Club, Long Wharf Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Intiman Theatre, Wilma Theatre, Portland Center Stage, East West Players, Dallas Theatre Center, Cornerstone Theatre Company, Group Theatre, Studio Theatre, Perseverance Theatre, Dad's Garage, Crowded Fire, Smithsonian Institute, North Carolina Performing Arts, amongst many others. Overseas, his work has been produced by the Royal Court Theatre (London, UK), Fattore K and Napoli Teatro Festival (Naples, Italy), La Mama (Melbourne, Australia), Four Arts (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), Singapore Repertory Theatre, Toy Factory, Checkpoint Theatre, TheatreWorks Singapore, to name a few. He is also the recipient of the London Fringe Award for Best Playwright and Best Play, George and Elisabeth Marton Playwriting Award, GLAAD Media Award, Asian Pacific Gays and Friends’ Community Visibility Award, Made in America Award, AEA/SAG/AFTRA 2004 Diversity Honor, and Robert Chesley Award; he has also received grants from the McKnight Foundation, Rockeller MAP Fund, and the TCG/Pew National Residency Program. His plays The Hyphenated American Plays and Porcelain and A Language of Their Own are published by Grove Press; the latter was nominated for a Lamda Literary Award, and anthologized in “Staging Gay Lives,” “Take Out,” “But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise,” “Humana Festival 2002 and 2006: The Complete Plays” and “American Political Plays After 9/11.” He recently edited a new anthology “Version 3.0: Contemporary Asian American Plays” for TCG Publications.
KAREN ZACARÍAS was recently hailed as one of the most produced playwrights in the US. Her award-winning playsinclude The Copper Children, Destiny of Desire, Native Gardens, The Book Club Play, Legacy of Light, Mariela in the Desert, The Sins of Sor Juana, the adaptations of Just Like Us, Into The Beautiful North, and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent. She is the author of ten renown TYA musicals and the librettist of several Ballets. She is one of the inaugural resident playwrights at Arena Stage, a core founder of the Latinx Theatre Commons, and a founder of Young Playwrights’ Theater. She was voted 2018 Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian Magazine for her advocacy work in the arts.