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ROBERTO AGUIRRE-SACASA is an American playwright, screenwriter, and comic book writer, best known for his Broadway plays Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark (Foxwoods Theatre) and American Psycho (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre). Off-Broadway works include Good Boys and True (2econd Stage Theatre) and Based on a Totally True Story (N.Y.C. Center Stage). Regional works include Abigail/1702 (Powerhouse Theater), Doctor Cerberus (South Coast Repertory), King of Shadows (Arena Stage), Rough Magic (Rorschach Theatre), The Velvet Sky (Woolly Mammoth Theatre), Dark Matters (Source Theatre), The Mystery Plays (McGinn/Cazale Theatre), Say You Love Satan (Plaza Theatre), and The Muckle Man (JPAC Theatre).Aguirre-Sacasa wrote for television episodes of FOX’s Glee, HBO’s Big Love, and HBO’s Looking. Film credits include an adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie and the screenplay for The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
J. SEBASTIÁN ALBERDI i is a playwright. originally from san diego, ca, he now lives and works in new york city and writes about queerness, religion, power, and other things. he was a 2018 lambda literary fellow, a finalist for the playwright's center many voices fellowship, as well as a semi-finalist for the princess grace award. he holds a b.a. in english from northeastern university, and is getting his mfa in dramatic writing at nyu tisch.
LUIS ALFARO: A renowned Los Angeles born and raised Chicano writer known for his work in poetry, theatre, short fiction, performance and journalism, Luis was Playwright-in-Residence at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival from 2013-2019 and a member of the Playwrights Ensemble at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater from 2013-2020. He has had productions at the Magic Theatre in SF, The Public Theater in NYC and Playwrights' Arena in LA. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, his plays include Electricidad, Oedipus el Rey, Mojada, Delano and Body of Faith. Luis has been associated with the Ojai Playwrights Conference since 2002.
Christina'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.
KORDE ARRINGTON TUTTLE is a multi-disciplinary artist from Charlotte, NC. His work has been seen at Ojai Playwrights Conference, The Fire This Time Festival, HomeBase Theatre Collective, The Movement Theatre Company, 2015’s AfroFuturism Conference and The Tenth Magazine. Tuttle is a recipient of the Steinberg Playwriting Fellowship and a finalist for both 2017 Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Contest and City Theatre National Award for Short Playwriting Contest. Film credits include Them: Covenant and Mix Tape. Tuttle is a current playwright-in-residence at Lincoln Center Theater and a Middle Voice Theatre Company Member at Rattlestick Playwright’s Theater. He received his MFA from The New School.
SOWMYA ASHOKKUMAR is an LA-based playwright, screenwriter, and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing centers women of color in narratives about home, hope and healing. She was a member of PlayGround SF’s Writers Pool (23rd Season) where her short plays were selected for S.T.E.M Night and WomenArts Night. She has been a member of City Light Theater’s LightSource Writers’ Group and is a current member of EST/LA’s NewWest Playwrights Group. Her play Phoenix has been read at Playwrights Foundation’s A Night of New Works and EnActe Arts Inc.’s staged reading series, Playful@EnActe. Her MFA thesis play, Santosha or The J3ng@ Play, was a semifinalist for the 2019 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference & received an honorable mention from the Jane Chambers 2019 Student Playwriting Contest. Sowmya has also been an educator for over two decades, specializing in English, Dramatic Writing, US History, World History, and US Government. In her spare time, Sowmya video chats with her toddler niece, and watches food documentaries and competition shows, picking up tips to add to her cooking routine. BA in English: UC Berkeley. MFA in Dramatic Writing: Carnegie Mellon University.
NISSY AYA is a writer, educator, and cultural worker who believes in the transformative nature of storytelling, placing those most affected by oppressive systems in the center, and examining how we move forward through healing justice and afrofuturist frameworks. Her creative work reflects those notions while exploring the lines between history and memory, detailing both the absence and presence of love, and giving all the life to Black Femmes. Aya was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow and a 2018 SPACE on Ryder Farm resident. She currently is a Brigade member with Brown Girl Recovery and core facilitator with artEquity.
JON ROBIN BAITZ: Regarded as a preeminent dramatist of the personal and public moral compromise in contemporary America, Robbie’s plays include Pulitzer Prize Finalist A Fair Country along with Pulitzer Prize Finalist Other Desert Cities, The Paris Letter and Vicuña, all three developed at the Ojai Playwrights Conference, and produced at Center Theatre Group. He is the creator of the long running ABC drama Brothers & Sisters and The Slap, a limited series for NBC. His screenplays include The Substance of Fire, based on his play, and Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall.
TANYA BARFIELD is from Portland, Oregon. Her play Bright Half Life premiered at the Women’s Project Theater and was a TimeOut Critic’s Pick. Her play The Call premiered at Playwrights Horizons in co-production with Primary Stages and was a Critic’s Pick for the New York Times. Blue Door (South Coast Rep, Playwrights Horizons) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Other work includes: Feast (co-writer, Young Vic/Royal Court), Of Equal Measure (Center Theatre Group), Chat (New Dramatists’ Playtime Festival), and The Quick (New York Stage & Film). A recipient of a Lilly Award, the inaugural Lilly Award Commission and a Helen Merrill Award, Tanya is a proud alumna of New Dramatists and a member of The Dramatist Guild Council. She has written for the upcoming Starz series, The One Percent. She currently writes for The Americans on FX.
AZIZA BARNES is blk & alive. Z’s play BLKS has been produced at Steppenwolf Theater, Woolly Mammoth Theater and MCC, and was nominated for the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding play, and winner of the Antonyo Award for Best Play. Z has participated with residencies such as Sundance, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Center Theater Group Playwriting Workshop, Callaloo and Cave Canem. Barnes’s play NANA was commissioned by Williamstown Theater Festival. Z lives in LA.
JAISEY BATES (they/she) creates nontraditional collaborative work with their multicultural nomadic theater company, The Peoplehood. While East Coast born and mostly grown, they are currently West Coast based in the traditional ancestral and unceded lands of the Tongva, Tataviam and Chumash (aka Los Angeles). Bates is a recipient of the Emerging American Playwright Prize (Marin Theatre Company) and a finalist (Princess Grace Award, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and American Blues Theater Blue Ink Award), semifinalist (American Shakespeare Center New Contemporaries), and honorable mention (Kilroy’s list). Recent virtual productions include collaborations with WP Theater, SameBoat (EarthQuake Festival), and Honor Roll in association with the African American Policy Forum, National Action Network and The Breath Project. Recent development opportunities include virtual workshops with Clamour Theatre Company, Cutting Ball Theater, and The Vagrancy’s Writers Group and Blossoming Festival, and selection for Native Voices at the Autry’s Festival of New Plays.
NATYNA BEAN is a Blk Queer-femme writer, educator & truth teller from Philly who witnesses and writes the world around her/them. The world - interpreted by Natyna - has been produced and/or developed in collaboration with The Playground Experiment, The Fire This Time Festival, Tectonic Theatre Company, Cape Cod Theater Project, Moving Arts Theater, 24 Hour Plays Nationals, The Bats of the Flea Theater in NY. Natyna is the recipient of the 2020 Lilly Award in Honor of Lorraine Hansberry, the 2014 KCACTF National Undergraduate Playwriting Award, and is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Natyna is currently pursuing an MFA in Playwriting at the New School University.
KIMBERLY BELLFLOWER is a playwright and educator originally from a small town in Appalachian Georgia. Her play, Lost Girl, is published by Samuel French and won the 2018 Kennedy Center Darrell Ayers National Playwriting Award. Her other plays include John Proctor is the Villain, Gondal, Teen Girl FANtasies, and The Sky Game, which have been commissioned, produced, and developed by Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, The Farm Theatre, We the Women Collective, Peppercorn Theatre, Less Than Rent Theatre, Front Porch Arts Collective, Cohen New Works Festival, as well as many colleges and universities across the country. Kimberly has also worked as a writer and narrative lead for Meow Wolf, Santa Fe's celebrated immersive arts company. Kimberly was a founding member of the New York women’s writing group, The Beehive Collective, and the founder of a creative arts program for preteen girls in Austin. She proudly holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin.
BENJAMIN BENNE (he/him) is a Yale School of Drama MFA Candidate in Playwriting and represented by Paradigm Talent Agency. He is a member of the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group at Primary Stages and currently under commission from South Coast Repertory Theatre. Awards: Portland Stage's Clauder Competition Gold Prize (2020), Arizona Theatre Company's National Latinx Playwriting Award (2019), Kennedy Center/KCACTF Latinx Playwriting Award (2019), American Blues Theater's Blue Ink Playwriting Award (2019), Chesley/Bumbalo Playwriting Award (2017), Playwrights’ Center’s McKnight Fellowship in Playwriting (2017-18) and Many Voices Fellowship (2016-17).Development: O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Realm, The Lark, The Public, Roundabout, Denver Center, The Old Globe, Two River, Seattle Rep, Boston Court Pasadena, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Pillsbury House Theatre, Parley, among many others. Forthcoming productions in 2022: ALMA (World Premiere) at American Blues Theater (Chicago, IL), ALMA (Seattle Premiere) at ArtsWest Playhouse (Seattle, WA), IN HIS HANDS (World Premiere) at Mosaic Theater Company (Washington, DC)
KEV BERRY is a New York-based playwright, performer, and life of the party. His work, both as a writer and a performer, has been seen at The Tank, Joe's Pub, Feinstein’s/54 Below, 3-Legged Dog, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Judson Memorial Church, HERE Arts Center, New York Live Arts, the New Ohio Theatre, The Duplex, the Dramatists Guild Foundation, Dixon Place, The Brick Theater, Access Theater, Littlefield, The 9 Studios, Otto's Shrunken Head, The Cobra Club, Skidmore College, and across the harsh North Country of upstate New York. Kev is an Associate Artist at The Tank, the September 2018 Artist-in-Residence at Judson Memorial Church, a 2017 Artist-in-Residence with Fresh Ground Pepper, a January 2019 resident with Hot Bread, a 2019-2020 INKubator Resident Playwright at Art House Productions, and the former Artistic Associate at 3LD. He is an inaugural member of the Fresh Ground Pepper Process Accountability Lab. Alongside his collaborative partner and director Alex Tobey, he was a 2019-2020 Full Access Resident Artist with Access Theater. Kev serves as the curator and producer of the series Fast and Furious: Rapid Responses to Current Events at The Tank. His play Peter was a Semi-Finalist for the Princess Grace Award in 2019, and a Semi-Finalist for the Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship in 2020. He was the recipient of a Pet Project Grant from Jeremy O. Harris and The Bushwick Starr. His performance in Nadja Leonhard-Hooper and Dan Nuxoll’s Eat the Devil was recently hailed by the New York Times as “vehemently campy.” Member: New Play Exchange, The Playwrights’ Center. B.Sci Theater, B.A. Gender Studies, Skidmore College.
AMY BERRYMAN is a New-York based writer and actor with roots in Washington State and West Texas. Her play Walden will debut on the West End in 2021 as a part of Sonia Friedman's RE:EMERGE Theatre Season, directed by Ian Rickson. Her other plays include The New Galileos (O'Neill Finalist), Three Year Summer, Ephiphany (Shakespeare's New Contemporaries Finalist, O'Neill Semi-Finalist), and The Whole of You (commissioned by Rising Phoenix Rep). Her work has been developed at theatres all across the US including Premiere Stages, People's Light, Bay Street Theatre, Portland Stage, PROP Thtr, Samuel French OOB Festival, City Theatre, Kitchen Dog Theatre, Landing Theatre, Caltech, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Valdez Theatre Conference, AMiOS, Barrington Collective, and Eden Theatre Co. The short film she wrote, co-produced, and starred in, YOU ARE EVERYWHERE, won Best Short Drama in the LA Short Film Festival 2018.
RAE BINSTOCK is a native of Cambridge, MA. She earned her B.A. from Columbia University, where she was mentored by David Henry Hwang and Ellen McLaughlin. Her plays have been produced and developed at The Lark, Public Arts Reading Series, West of 10th Theater Company, The Hearth, The Fresh Fruit Festival, Crashbox Theater Company, Pride Films & Plays, Idle Muse Theatre, Monster Piece Theatre Collection, Stella Adler’s Playwrights Division, New Perspective Theatre Company, and the Historic Elitch Theatre New Works Festival. Rae is a 2017-18 Fellow in The Lark’s Rita Goldberg Playwrights Workshop and the 2017 recipient of The David Ross Fetzer Foundation for Emerging Artists’ Theatre Grant. She has been awarded residencies by the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico; she is also a contributing writer at Slate.com, the creator of the fiction podcast Tapes From Jane Street, and an O’Neill Conference, SPACE at Ryder Farm, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and ATHE Judith Royer Award of Excellence in Playwriting semifinalist. Rae lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her bike and her cat. (Allison Schwartz, Paradigm Talent Agency; www.raebinstock.com)
LIZA BIRKENMEIER is a recent alum of the Play Group at Ars Nova. Her work has been developed at Dixon Place, University Settlement, Playwrights Realm, The Public Theater, CATCH, City Theatre, NYSAF and elsewhere. She is the author of Dr. Ride's American Beach House, which premiered at Ars Nova in 2019. Her newest collaboration with director Katie Brook, Islander, will premiere at NYTW Next Door next season. She is a MacDowell Colony and Yaddo Fellow. MFA Carnegie Mellon. Liza Birkenmeier is Ars Nova’s 2019-20 Tow Playwright-in-Residence.
ADAM BOCK is a playwright best known for A Small Fire, The Receptionist, The Drunken City, The Thugs, and Swimming in the Shallows. He writes both comedy and drama, blending whimsical surrealism with dark and painful exploration of character. Charles Isherwood described A Small Fire as “a theatrical combo plate that proves unusually satisfying ... raucous, funny and unexpectedly touching.” Adam has had more than ten plays produced at prestigious theatres including Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep., Second Stage Uptown, Rattlestick, and Yale Rep. He has received the Obie Award, BATCC Award, Clauder Prize, Glickman Award, and Guernsey Award, and been nominated for the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards. Adam has been a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an artistic associate at Shotgun Players and Encore Theater.
LYNDSEY BOURNE is a queer Canadian playwright, teacher and a birth/abortion doula working with The Doula Project and Planned Parenthood. Her plays have been developed with The Tank, Dixon Place, La Mama, The Joust Theatre Company, New Georges, The Barn Arts Collective, Judson Church, Brooklyn College, Playwrights Horizons Downtown and Ars Nova. She was a 2019 Resident artist at The Barn Arts Collective and Judson Church. Lyndsey teaches playwriting at Playwrights Horizons Theater School (NYU). She is a New Georges affiliated artist and a 2020 NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theater Grant recipient. Lyndsey is represented by Abrams Artists Agency. BFA NYU, MFA Brooklyn College
AMARA BRADY (she/her/hers) is a generative artist & cultural dramaturg from Chicago. At the crux of her artistry is uplifting Black women and connecting underserved communities. As an actor she’s been on stage at The Lark, Joe’s Pub, NYU Skirball, Barrington Stage Co., NYTW, 54 Below, & others. As a writer her work has been staged at The Drama League, The Dramatists Guild, Joe’s Pub, and The Wow Cafe Theatre. She wants to remind you to resist, check your privilege, & then give some space to Women of Color & Trans Folx. Ashé to the ancestors. All Power to all people. https://linktr.ee/ajbrady
A.A. BRENNER (they / them) is a playwright, dramaturg, and New Yorker. Their writing blends naturalistic dialogue with heightened realism to explore queer, Jewish, and disability themes, challenging both societal power structures and theatrical form. A.A.'s plays have been produced or commissioned by La Jolla Playhouse, National Disability Theatre, CO/LAB Theater Group, Shakespeare Theatre Company (Fellows Consortium), Three Muses Theatre Company, Young Playwrights Inc., The Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, Columbia University, and The Hangar Theatre Lab Company, among others, and have been featured on the 2020 Kilroys List. Most recently, A.A. was named a Finalist for the 2020-22 Apothetae & Lark Playwriting Fellowship, and is also one of the inaugural recipients of the Jody Falco and Jeffrey Steinman Award. Currently, A.A. resides in Manhattan and is a third-year MFA candidate at Columbia University School of the Arts.
JOHN J. CASWELL JR. is a playwright originally from Phoenix, a current fellow at Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program, and the winner of the 2020-2021 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award at the Vineyard Theatre. Additional honors include the 2020 Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award, 2019 Relentless Award Finalist for Wet Brain, 2018 MacDowell Fellowship, 2018 SPACE on Ryder Farm Creative Residency, Play Group member at Ars Nova, and the 2017 Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship. He is currently under commission at Playwrights Horizons. His work is cited frequently as an example of queer-themed theatre, most recently referenced in articles appearing in Theatre Topics, The International Journal of the Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, and the European Journal of Comparative American Studies. Included as a consummate demonstration of auto-ethnographic theatre, his play SHOTS: A Love Story was published as part of Johnny Saldaña's book Ethnotheatre: Research From Page to Stage published by Left Coast Press. Education: Artist Diploma, Juilliard School (in process). MFA, Hunter College. BA, Arizona State University.
MEGAN CHAN MEINERO (pronounced Meeeeegan) is a playwright & screenwriter. Her plays have been produced/developed by Ensemble Studio Theatre, The New Group, Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival, The Flea Theater, Rule of 7x7, PLAYxPLAY, Normal Ave, Two Headed Rep, Williamstown Theatre Directing Corps, Atlantic Acting School and others. She’s a proud member of EST/Youngblood. Commissions from The New Group, EST/The Sloan Foundation and American University. Currently, Megan is adapting her play, GOOD FORTUNE, for the screen with A-Major Media and 42. She’s also a staff writer at Apple TV+. Megan was featured in lululemon athletica’s Proud + Present campaign celebrating 50 years of Pride. Her writing was once lovingly described as “surgery where you're left with the sneaking suspision the surgeon intentionally left something behind.”
PRESTON CHOI is a Chicago based playwright whose work focuses on Asian-American history, mixed race experience, and social science fiction. His plays include A Great Migration or The Migratory Patterns of the North American Monarch Butterfly and Fatherless Sons (2017 Agnes Nixon Award; 2018 Playwrights Realm Scratchpad Series finalist), This Is Not A True Story (CAATA ConFest 2018; 2019 Bay Area Playwright's Festival finalist), Happy Birthday Mars Rover (The Passage Theatre; 2018 G45 Lightbulb Reading Series), You Will Get Used To It (2019 Playwrights Realm Scratchpad Series finalist), and 100 Mysteries of [REDACTED] Community College (Clubbed Thumb 2020 Biennial Commission Finalist). His plays have been developed with Silk Road Rising, A Squared, Theatre Mu, Artists at Play, CAATA, The Passage Theatre, G45 Productions, The Forum, AATAB, Chicago Scratch, Victory Gardens College Night, Our Perspective, Wave Productions, and Vertigo Productions. He graduated from Northwestern University in 2018 with a BS in Theatre which feels appropriate.
XANDRA NUR CLARK (they/them or she/her) is a playwright, actor, journalist, musician, and all-around storyteller. Raised in an interracial, interreligious, intercultural household, they have learned to both welcome and challenge all perspectives. Their work, which often fuses theater and journalism, is intimate, investigative, and urgent. Gently, and almost sneakily, Xandra aims to reveal what is relatable about the “other” and what is ultimately mysterious about the self. Xandra’s work has been featured at Dixon Place, The Tank, The Flea, Weeksville Heritage Center, Five Myles, Judson Church, Queer Abstract, and Brooklyn College, and been funded by NYSCA/Brooklyn Arts Council, Brooklyn Community Foundation, and Stanford Arts. Acting credits include at EST, Rattlestick, The Flea, The Lark/Noor Theatre, BAM, and The High Line. Xandra is a 2018-19 Queer|Art Fellow and a company member of The Bats at The Flea, Poetic Theater, and folk choir Ukrainian Village Voices. Xandra received the 2013 Award for Local Reporting from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, was a 2018 Semi-Finalist for SPACE on Ryder Farm’s Greenhouse Residency, and is a New York State-certified Rape Crisis Counselor for the Anti-Violence Project’s crisis hotline. BA Theater, MA Journalism: Stanford University. www.xandraclark.com
XAVIER CLARK (he/him/his) is a multidisciplinary theatre artist, born and raised in Turkey. He is bilingual in Turkish and English. As a playwright, his short plays "jalapeño poppers-crusted bubblegum pizza" and "waiting for things that won't come" were recently featured in Fault Line Theatre's [...in the time of corona] digital series. His play "backstroke boys" was selected as a finalist for The 2021 Blue Ink Playwriting Award, The New Harmony Project's 2020 Spring Conference, the 2019 Theatre Viscera Queer Playwriting Contest, and will be developed with Fault Line Theatre's 2021 Irons in the Fire in NYC and Playwrights' Arena's 2021 Bonfire Series in Los Angeles. His play "retrofit(s)" was a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 O'Neill Center NPC and 2020 Seven Devils Playwrights' Conference, and a finalist for The Lark's 2019 Playwrights' Week and the 2019 Mitten Lab. He was a semi-finalist for The Civilians' 2020-21 R&D Group and a finalist for National Black Theatre's 2020-21 I AM SOUL Playwriting Residency. He is currently a member of Donja R. Love's "learning to love" playwriting fellowship's inaugural cohort. He earned his B.F.A. in Drama from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where he is currently on faculty through the Stella Adler Studio, and his M.F.A. in Acting from UC San Diego, where he was mentored in playwriting by Allan Havis and Deborah Stein.
JORDAN E. COOPER is an Obie Award-winning playwright and performer who was most recently chosen to be one of Out Magazine’s “Entertainers of the Year.” Last spring's run of his play Ain’t No Mo’, a New York Times Critic's Pick, sold out. Jordan created a pandemic centered-short film called “Mama Got a Cough” that has been featured in National Geographic and was named among the "Best Theater of 2020" by The New York Times. He is currently filming The Ms. Pat Show, an R-rated "old school" sitcom he created for BET+, which will debut later this year. He can also be seen as Tyrone in the final season of FX’s Pose.
FERNANDA COPPEL is a playwright and screenwriter. Her play King Liz received its world premiere at Second Stage Theatre in an acclaimed, extended run in the summer of 2015. King Liz was sold to Showtime and is being developed into a half hour comedy-drama. Fernanda was a writer-producer on both the series "Queen of the South" on USA network and the upcoming Jason Katims and Jeffrey Seller NBC series “Rise”. She's written for “From Dusk Til Dawn” for Robert Rodriguez and the El Rey network, Shonda Rhimes's “How to Get Away with Murder” on ABC, DirecTV’s “Kingdom,” and “The Bridge” on FX. Her professional New York debut Chimichangas and Zoloft premiered at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2012 and is published by Samuel French. Fernanda’s 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, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, and the Sundance Institute. 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 New York University.
PHILIP DAWKINS is a Chicago-based playwright and educator whose plays have been performed all over the world. His plays include Failure: A Love Story (Victory Gardens Theater), Le Switch (About Face Theatre, The Jungle), The Homosexuals (About Face Theater), The Burn (Steppenwolf for Young Audiences), Dr.Seuss’s The Sneetches, the Musical with composer David Mallamud and Spamtown, USA (both with Children’s Theater Company, Minneapolis), The Gentleman Caller (Raven Theatre, Chicago; Abingdon Theatre, NY), Charm (Northlight Theatre; MCC), Miss Marx: Or The Involuntary Side Effect of Living (Strawdog Theatre), and his solo play, The Happiest Place on Earth (Sideshow Theatre/Greenhouse Theater Center). Philip has won some awards and not won some others. He’s been a fellow at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in Scotland and the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and has taught playwriting at his alma mater, Loyola University Chicago, Northwestern University, Victory Gardens Theater and for the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. Many of Philip’s plays, including his scripts for young performers, are available through Dramatists Play Service, Playscripts, Inc. and Dramatic Publishing. He is currently working on an American English translaptation of Michel Tremblay’s Messe Solennelle Pour Une Pleine Lune D'été for Sideshow Theatre.
NOAH DIAZ is a playwright and television writer from the Iowa/Nebraska border. His plays have been developed with Roundabout Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Baltimore Center Stage, Two River Theater, The Sol Project, First Floor Theater, and The Playwrights Realm, where he is the current Page One Resident Playwright. He is a recipient of the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize for Excellence in Playwriting, a five-time recipient of playwriting awards from the Kennedy Center, and is currently under commission from La Jolla Playhouse, Manhattan Theatre Club/Sloan, The Great Plains Theatre Commons, Baltimore Center Stage, and Audible/Amazon Studios. MFA: Yale School of Drama He has written on Joe Exotic (NBC, USA, and Peacock), Vampire Academy (Peacock), and is currently developing projects for Eva Longoria’s UnbeliEVAble Entertainment, AMC, and Hulu.
ERIKA DICKERSON-DESPENZA is a Blk, queer feminist poet-playwright and cultural-memory worker from Chicago, Illinois. Awards: Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (2021), Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award (2020), Thom Thomas Award (2020), Lilly Award (2020), Barrie and Bernice Stavis Award (2020), Grist 50 Fixer (2020), Princess Grace Playwriting Award (2019). Residencies & Fellowships: Tow Playwright-in-Residence at The Public Theater (2019-2020), U.S. Water Alliance National Arts & Culture Delegate (2019), New York Stage and Film Fellow-in-Residence (2019), New Harmony Project Writer-in Residence (2019), Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow (2018-2019), The Lark Van Lier New Voices Fellow (2018). Communities: BYP100 Squad Member, Ars Nova Play Group (2019-2021), Youngblood Collective (EST). Commissions: Climate Change Theatre Action, The Public Theater, Studio Theatre & Williamstown Theatre Festival. Productions: CULLUD WATTAH (originally slated at The Public Theater, 2020; Victory Gardens Theater, 2021), [HIEROGLYPH] (San Francisco Playhouse/Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 2021). Currently, Erika is developing a 10-play Katrina Cycle, including [HIEROGLYPH] and SHADOW/LAND, focused on the effects of Hurricane Katrina and its state-sanctioned, man-made disaster rippling in & beyond New Orleans.
COLMAN DOMINGO: A 2021 Film Independent Spirit, NAACP, SAG and Critics Choice Award nominee for his work in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Colman Domingo is a Tony, Olivier, Drama Desk, and Drama League Award nominated actor, director, writer and producer. Colman has recently received his Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Ursinus College. He just joined the faculty of University of Southern California, School of Dramatic Arts as a Professor of acting, after having served as a Juilliard School Creative Associate and a faculty member of the Yale School of Drama. Colman has starred in some of the most profound films in recent years such as Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk, Steven Spielbergs' Lincoln, Lee Daniel's The Butler, Ava DuVernay's Selma and Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation. He stars in the upcoming films, Jordan Peele's Candyman and Janicza Bravo's Zola. He stars on AMC's Fear the Walking Dead for seven seasons and guest stars on HBO's Euphoria as Ali. He recurred on Steven Soderbergh's series The Knick. As a writer, his plays and musicals include Dot (Samuel French), Wild with Happy (Dramatist Play Service) and A Boy and His Soul (Oberon Books), the Tony Award nominated Broadway musical Summer: The Donna Summer Musical and Geffen Playhouse’s groundbreaking musical Light's Out: Nat King Cole. His plays have been produced by The Public Theater, Vineyard, La Jolla Playhouse, Humana Festival of New American Plays, New York Stage and Film, A.C.T, The Tricycle Theater in London, Brisbane Powerhouse in Australia, among others. He is the recipient of a Lucille Lortel, Obie, Audelco and GLAAD Award for his work. His production company, Edith Productions, has a first look deal with AMC Studios for which he is developing television, film, theater and animation projects. He is currently writing a new musical for The Young Vic in London/ Concord Music and hosting Season 3 of his series, Bottomless Brunch at Colman's across AMC platforms.
CORINNE DONLY’s plays include Wood Calls Out to Wood (World Premiere, The Tank; 2017 Weasel Festival, the Public Theater; upcoming publication with 53rd State Press); Orchid Receipt Service (2018 Reading Series, the Bushwick Starr); Because of the Mud (2017 B-Side Fest, the Wild Project); Wild Whore Says: Couldn't Drag Me Away (Brooklyn Arts Exchange); and The Brutes (Toronto Theatre Center). Their work has received developmental support through New Georges’s Audrey Residency, SPACE on Ryder Farm’s Creative Residency, BAX’s Space Grant, Target Margin’s Lab Series, and the Queerness is Actively Built Residency in Montreal, Quebec. Donly teaches writing to undergraduates at Brooklyn College and play-making to high school students in Canarsie (through the organization Opening Act). They hold an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, an MA in Integral Ecology, and a BFA in acting from NYU’S Experimental Theatre Wing.
BATHSHEBA DORAN’s critically acclaimed play KIN received its world premiere in Spring 2011 at Playwrights Horizons, directed by Sam Gold. Her play PARENTS' EVENING premiered at the Flea Theater, directed by Jim Simpson and her play BEN AND THE MAGIC PAINTBRUSH premiered in Spring 2010 at South Coast Repertory Theater. She has adapted THE NO. 1 LADIES DETECTIVE AGENCY as a feature film for HBO and also wrote season two of the acclaimed Martin Scorcese HBO series "Boardwalk Empire." Other plays include LIVING ROOM IN AFRICA (produced off-Broadway by the award-winning Edge Theater), NEST (commissioned and produced by Signature Theater in D.C.), UNTIL MORNING (BBC Radio 4), and adaptations of Dickens' GREAT EXPECTATIONS (starring Kathleen Chalfant at the Lucille Lortel), Maeterlinck's THE BLIND (Classic Stage Company), and PEER GYNT (directed by Andrei Serban at the Theater of the Riverside Church). She is a 2009 recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwrighting Award and three Lecomte du Nouy Lincoln Center Playwrighting Awards. She is a Cherry Lane Mentor Project Fellow and a Susan Smith Blackburn Award finalist. Ms. Doran's work has been developed by Manhattan Theatre Club, the O'Neill Theatre Center, Lincoln Center, Sundance Theatre Lab, Almeida Theater (London), and Playwright's Horizons, among others. Ms. Doran's first play, FEMININE WASH, was produced at the Edinburgh Fringe festival while she was a student at Cambridge University, from which she holds a BA and an MA. She then went on to Oxford University, where she received an MA before working as a television comedy writer with the BBC. Ms. Doran moved to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2000, received her MFA from Columbia University, and went on to become a Playwright Fellow of The Julliard School. She is currently under commission from Atlantic Theater and Playwright's Horizons in New York City. Her work is available through Samuel French, Playscripts, Inc, and Dramatists Play Service. She lives in New York City.
RYAN DRAKE (he/they) is a queer playwright and filmmaker in Brooklyn, NY. Plays include HOMESICK, OR SACRED HETEROSEXUAL SPACES (2021 Rita & Burton Goldberg Playwriting Prize, 2021 Playwrights’ Center Core Apprentice Program Finalist), COURTSHIP (2021 BAPF Semi-finalist), YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING (2019 Eugene O'Neill NPC Semi-finalist, Less than Rent Theatre), TERRIBLE RAGE (The Tank), ROLLER DYNASTY (Medicine Show, The Actors Company LA, Table Work Press Recommended 2020, 999 Festival), MOON KIDS (Crashbox Theatre Company, Mason Holdings) and GAMING AND CRYING AND DREAMING AND GAMING (Dixon Place, Actors Theatre Louisville Apprentice Workshop). Short plays have been featured at The Wild Project, 7x7 at The Tank, Serials@TheFlea, Kenyon College, YesNoise High Line Series, Calliope Theatre, and The Playwrights Collective. He wrote the webseries "Sensitive" which can be streamed on Amazon Prime through ENV, and SeekaTV. "Sensitive" was featured on Canada's OutTV on their network series "Best of the Web". He graduated from Kenyon College in 2014 winning the James E Michael Playwriting Prize. MFA; Hunter College (Playwriting)
LISA SANAYE DRING was honored as a recipient of the 2020/21 PLAY LA Stage Raw/Humanitas Prize. Her play The Wicked One was a finalist for the Relentless Award, a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, a finalist for the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference and a semi-finalist for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference. Kaidan Project: Walls Grow Thin, a piece she co-wrote with Chelsea Sutton, was nominated for 8 Ovation Awards including Best Production (winner of 5). Lisa's work has been developed/produced by The New Group, Actors Theatre of Louisville, East West Players, Circle X, SCF @ Son of Semele, Playwrights’ Arena, Rogue Artists Ensemble, The Motor Company, Theatre of NOTE and with the DCA's Reimagine Public Art Series. She recently served as the head writer on Welcome to the Blumhouse Live, an interactive film event for Blumhouse/Amazon Prime by Little Cinema. Lisa was a member of East West Players’ Playwrights Group and has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Blue Mountain Center and Yaddo Her play SUMO was recently named as a finalist for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference and will be workshopped at La Jolla Playhouse in July. She graduated from the University of Southern California.
OYA MAE DUCHESS-DAVIS is a multi-souled pansexual, disabled (MS) playwright and Santeria practitioner from Minneapolis, MN. Her various intersecting identities are the main inspirations for her writing. Her artistic aim is to create stories so Black youth can see characters on stage who not only look like them but are dealing with some of the extreme circumstances that they may be dealing with. Oya was a 2016 Many Voices Mentee. Her play SKIN was a part of the 2017 Twin Cities Horror Festival and her play LUNCH was part of the 2020 Twin Cities Horror Festival. Oya was a finalist for The Apothetae Playwriting Fellowship through the Lark Theatre in New York City and The Many Voices Fellowship through The Playwrights’ Center. Oya is currently an I AM SOUL Playwriting Resident at National Black Theater.
OLIVIA DUFAULT’s plays include Year of the Rooster (New York Time's Critics' Pick), The Tomb of King Tot (New York Time's Critics' Pick), The Messenger, and For Want of a Horse. Her plays have been performed at the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Youngblood, the Flea Theatre, the Marin Theatre, the 52nd Street Project, the Theater for the New City, UpStart Theater, and the Stray Dog Theater, amongst others. She is the recipient of the 2015 Playwrights of New York Fellowship, a 2013 Sloan Commission, the 2013 David Colicchio Emerging Playwright Award, the 2010 Lipkin Playwriting Award, and the 2008, 2009, and 2010 Harle Adair Damann Playwriting Award. Her work is included in the Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2014 and Best New Plays of 2014 anthologies. She currently writes for the AMC television show Preacher. She is a member of New Dramatists and the Obie award-winning Youngblood Playwriting Group.
LIZ DUFFY ADAMS’ play Or, premiered Off Broadway at WP Theater and has been produced some 70 times since, including at the Magic Theater, Seattle Rep, and Roundhouse Theatre. She’s a New Dramatists alumna and has received a Women of Achievement Award, Lillian Hellman Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Weston Playhouse Music-Theater Award, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, and the Will Glickman Award. Her work has also been produced or developed at the Alley Theatre, Contemporary American Theater Festival, Humana Festival, Bay Area Theater Festival, Portland Center Stage, Syracuse Stage, New Georges, Clubbed Thumb, Cutting Ball, Shotgun Players, Greater Boston Stage Company, and Crowded Fire, among others. Other plays include Born with Teeth; Dog Act; The Salonnières; Dear Alien; Wonders of the Invisible World; Buccaneers; Wet or, Isabella the Pirate Queen Enters the Horse Latitude; The Listener; The Reckless Ruthless Brutal Charge of It or, The Train Play; and One Big Lie. Publications include Or, in Smith & Kraus’ “Best Plays Of 2010;” Dog Act in “Geek Theater,” Underwords Press 2014; Poodle With Guitar And Dark Glasses in Applause’s “Best American Short Plays 2000-2001;” and several plays in acting editions by Playscripts, Inc. and Dramatists Play Service. Adams has an MFA from Yale School of Drama and a BFA from New York University, and was the 2012–2013 Briggs-Copeland Visiting Lecturer in Playwriting at Harvard University. She has dual Irish and American citizenship, and lives in New York City on land that once belonged to the Lenape, and in Western Mass on Pocumtuc and Nipmuc land.
TIMOTHY DUWHITE (he/they) is a Black/queer poet, actor, and activist based out of Brooklyn, NY. His essays and poetry can be found in The Rumpus, The Root, Afropunk, Black Youth Project, The Grio, and elsewhere. In the summer of 2018, DuWhite debuted his one-man show NEPTUNE as the headliner for Dixon Place's annual “Hot Festival.” Following rave reviews and sold-out performances, NEPTUNE was then restaged as the 2019 kick-off event for Brooklyn Museum’s acclaimed “1st Saturday'' series. DuWhite was named a “Black LGBTQ+ playwright you need to know” by Time Out NY. He is an alumnus of the Public Theater’s #BARS program, brainchild of actors/writers Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. DuWhite is a current member of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group 2020-2022 cohort. A 2020-2021 BAM Resident Artist. DuWhite’s previous BAM appearances include Word. Sound. Power. 2019 (2019 Spring) and Essex Hemphill: Remembering and Reimagining (2019 Spring). DuWhite is the Senior Editor at RaceBaitr.com, Program Director at NY Writers Coalition, and is represented by A3 Artist Agency for Acting & Playwriting.
ADAM A. ELSAYIGH is a playwright, translator, producer, and independent scholar residing between Cairo and New York. Through his playwriting (The House of Grandma Hanem, Drowning in Cairo, and Ramadan on 42nd Street) and curatorial initiatives, Adam interrogates issues of immigration, colonialism and the experience of queerness in the Middle East. Adam developed The House of Grandma Hanem in NYU Abu Dhabi, and later at Theater For The New City in New York. He then developed Drowning in Cairo, through workshops in Bangalore, Abu Dhabi and New York, and recently presented it with the Golden Threads Theater in San Francisco as a part of their New Threads reading series. Adam is an Associate International Artist with National Queer Theatre and is currently workshopping his upcoming play, Ramadan on 43rd Street. Adam holds a BA in Theater with emphasis on Playwriting, Dramaturgy and World Theater from NYU Abu Dhabi. He is a PhD candidate at The Graduate Centre in the City University of New York, and an Artistic Apprentice at The Lark Center for Play Development.
KAREEM FAHMY is a Canadian-born director and playwright of Egyptian descent. He has directed a number of world premiere productions including James Scruggs’s 3/Fifths (3LD, New York Times Top 5 Must-See Shows), Sevan K. Greene’s This Time (Sheen Center, New York Times Critics’ Pick), Bess Welden’s Refuge*Malja (Portland Stage), Adam Kraar’s Alternating Currents (Working Theater), Nikkole Salter’s Indian Head (Luna Stage), and Victor Lesniewski’s Couriers and Contrabands (TBG Theatre, also co-creator). His plays, which include American Fast, A Distinct Society, The Triumphant, Pareidolia, The In-Between, and an adaptation of the acclaimed Egyptian novel The Yacoubian Building have been developed or presented at The Atlantic Theater Company, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Northlight Theatre, New York Stage & Film, Target Margin Theater, The Lark, Capital Repertory Theatre, Fault Line Theater, and Noor Theater. Kareem has been a fellow or resident artist at the Sundance Theatre Lab, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Phil Killian Directing Fellow), Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center (National Directors Fellow), TCG (Rising Leaders of Color), Second Stage (Van Lier Directing Fellow), Soho Rep (Writer/Director Lab), Lincoln Center (Directors Lab), The New Museum (Artist-in-Residence), and New York Theater Workshop (Emerging Artist Fellow & Usual Suspect). He has developed new plays at theaters around the country, including MCC, The Atlantic, The New Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre, New Dramatists, The Civilians, Geva Theatre, Pioneer Theatre, Silk Road Rising, and Berkeley Rep. He is a founder of Maia Directors, a consulting group for organizations and artists engaging with stories from the Middle East and beyond. MFA: Columbia University. Kareem lives in New York City with his husband, acclaimed fiction writer John McManus.
L M FELDMAN is a queer, feminist playwright who writes theatrically adventurous, physically kinetic, ensemble-driven plays that are both epic and intimate – usually about outsiders, often about searchers, always about the human connection. Her plays include THRIVE, OR WHAT YOU WILL (Page 73 & New Georges Residencies, InterAct Core Playwrights); ANOTHER KIND OF SILENCE (Colorado New Play Summit, FEWW Prize Honorable Mention, Magic Theatre Virgin Play Festival, PlayPenn & Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, Playwrights Realm Fellowship); AMANUENSIS, OR THE MILTONS (Emerson Stage, Georgetown University, Northwoods Ramah Theatre commission); THE EGG-LAYERS (Jane Chambers Honorable Mention, New Georges/Barnard College co-commission); GRACE, OR THE ART OF CLIMBING (Denver Center, Brown Paper Box Co., Art House Productions, Nice People Theatre, ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award Nomination, Barrymore Nomination); and A PEOPLE (Orbiter 3, YiddishFest, Jewish Plays Project); as well as a half-dozen devised works and a baker’s dozen of short plays. She has been nominated for the Wendy Wasserstein Prize, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, the New York Innovative Theatre Award, and the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award. She’s a recent MacDowell Colony fellow and InterAct Theatre Core Playwright. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama and the New England Center for Circus Arts, L is also a performer & dramaturg of contemporary circus. She has performed at festivals around the world, and she’s an artistic coach for circus artists around the country. She loves theater that moves, and circus that tells stories. L has lived in seven cities and is now based in Philadelphia, where she teaches and is writing two very different new plays: commissions from EST/Sloan (a play about the Mercury 13) and the Children’s Theatre of Charlotte (a theatrical adaptation of Margarita Engle’s verse novel Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba for ages 8+). // www.laurenfeldman.com
GINA FEMIA's work has been seen/developed at MCC Theater, Playwrights Horizons, EST, Page 73, Playwrights’ Center, CTG, Theater of NOTE, Panndora Productions, among others. Plays include ALLOND(R)A (2019 Kilroys List, Winner: Leah Ryan Prize, Runner-up, Yale Drama Prize), THIS HAPPENED ONCE AT THE ROMANCE DEPOT OFF THE I-87 IN WESTCHESTER (2019 Kilroys List Honorable Mention), We Are a Masterpiece (Winner: The Doric Wilson Award, Stage Rights publishing), The Mermaids' Parade (Finalist, American Blue Ink Award, Semifinalist, The Relentless Award, Finalist, Princess Grace Award), For The Love Of (Original Works Publishing), and The Violet Sisters (New Harmony Project, Great Plains Theatre Conference). Gina is a 2019-2022 Core Writer with the Playwrights Center, and an alum of EST Youngblood, Page73's Interstate 73, Pipeline Theatre’s PlayLab, New Georges' Audrey Residency, Nashville Rep’s Ingram New Plays Lab and Parsnip Ship’s Radio Roots Writer’s Group. Gina’s a New Georges Affiliated Artist and has received residencies with Page73, Powerhouse, NTI at the O’Neill, SPACE on Ryder Farm, and Fresh Ground Pepper. MFA, Sarah Lawrence College (Lipkin Prize in Playwriting).
HARVEY FIERSTEIN won two Tony Awards® for Torch Song Trilogy (Best Play, Best Actor) which was recently revived on Broadway this past fall, starring Michael Urie as ‘Arnold Beckoff.’ He has also written the Tony-winning hit Kinky Boots (Best Musical), as well as La Cage aux Folles (Tony and Drama Desk Awards), Newsies (Tony nominated), Casa Valentina (Tony nominated), A Catered Affair (12 Drama Desk nominations), Safe Sex (Ace Award), Legs Diamond, Spookhouse, Flatbush Tosca, Common Ground and more. He recently wrote teleplays for NBC’s live TV broadcasts of “Hairspray” and “The Wiz.” He also revised the book for Funny Girl, which ran to critical acclaim in London. His political editorials have been published in the New York Times, TV Guide and the Huffington Post, and broadcast on PBS’s “In the Life.” His children’s book, The Sissy Duckling (Humanitas Award), is now in its fifth printing. As an actor, Fierstein is known worldwide for his performances in films including Mrs. Doubtfire, Independence Day, and Bullets Over Broadway, on stage in Hairspray (TonyAward), Fiddler on the Roof, La Cage aux Folles, and on television shows such as “Smash,” “How I Met Your Mother,” “The Good Wife,” “Cheers” (Emmy nomination), “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” and “Nurse Jackie.”
MARCUS GARDLEY is a poet-playwright. He was the 2012 James Baldwin Fellow and the 2011 PEN Laura Pels award winner for Mid-Career Playwright. The New Yorker describes Gardley as “the heir to Garcia Lorca, Pirandello and Tennessee Williams.” His play The House that Will Not Stand was commissioned and produced by Berkeley Rep and had subsequent productions at Yale Rep and the Tricycle Theater in London. He is an ensemble member playwright at Victory Gardens Theater where his play The Gospel of Loving Kindness was produced in March and where he won the 2015 BTAA award for best play. In 2014, his saga The Road Weeps, the Well Runs Dry about the migration of Black Seminoles (a tribe of African American and First Nation People) from Florida to Oklahoma had a national tour. He has had numerous productions some of which, include: Every Tongue Confess at Arena Stage starring Phylicia Rashad and directed by Kenny Leon and On The Levee which, premiered in 2010 at Lincoln Center Theater 3. He is the recipient of the 2011 Aetna New Voice Fellowship at Hartford Stage, the Hellen Merrill Award, a Kellsering Honor and the Gerbode Emerging Playwright Award. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale Drama School and is a member of The Dramatists Guild. Gardley is a professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Brown University.
KAELA MEI-SHING GARVIN is a writer, producer, performer, and educator. Originally from Mountain View, CA, with stints in Indiana and New York, Kaela is a founding member of Undiscovered Countries, a Brooklyn-based incubator of new interdisciplinary art. Kaela is a 2021 Bay Area Playwrights Festival selection, a 2021 Seven Devils Conference and Kendeda Playwriting Award finalist, and the recipient of six Kennedy Center awards, including the Mark Twain Comic Playwriting Award and Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Awards. Their plays have been developed with The Alliance Theater, Montana Repertory Theater, and College of the Holy Cross, and have been produced in New York at venues including Dixon Place, the New Ohio, and Ars Nova. Their work examines the spaces where privilege and oppression overlap through humor, history, and pop culture. Garvin currently teaches playwriting at Cornish College of the Arts. MFA, IU; BFA, NYU.
KEELAY GIPSON is an Activist, Teaching Artist, and Award-winning Playwright whose plays include #NewSlaves (Finalist; The O’Neill, Seven Devils Playwright Conference), CRH, or the placenta play (AADA Main Stage Live!, Semi-Finalist; The O’Neill, Bay Area Playwrights Conference), What I Tell You in the Dark (Finalist; Premiere Stages). He is the recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, as well as writing fellowships with Lambda Literary, The Amoralists, Page 73, Dramatist Guild Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts. He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of New York, the Administration of Children’s Services of the City of New York as well as an upcoming residency at New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theater Season at Vassar this summer. His work has been seen/developed at HERE Arts Center, National Black Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, The Lark, The Fire This Time Festival, Classical Theater of Harlem, and New York Theatre Workshop.
EMMA GOIDEL's plays include Two Minutes To Midnight (Clubbed Thumb Early-Career Writers Group, mentored by Sheila Callaghan), The Gap (Barrymore Award, 2019 Kilroys List, American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg Award Nominee), Local Girls (Princess Grace Award Finalist, Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow), A Knee That Can Bend (American Theatre Critics Association/Steinberg Award Nominee, Barrymore Award Finalist, Lanford Wilson Award Nominee), and We Can All Agree To Pretend This Never Happened (EST Marathon, Òran Mór in Glasgow, InterAct & Tiny Dynamite in Philly). Emma is the 2020 Page 73 Playwriting Fellow. She is also a 2019/2020 resident artist at Colt Coeur, a member of the 2020 I73 Writers Group at Page 73, a member of the 2020 Orchard Project Greenhouse Lab, and a New Georges Affiliated Artist. Her work has been developed and presented by Ars Nova, Azuka Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Ensemble Studio Theatre, LAByrinth Theatre Co., Playwrights Realm, The Playwrights’ Center, New York Stage & Film, PlayPenn’s The Foundry, Theater Exile, and InterAct Theatre Company. Commissions: Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Hearth, Tiny Dynamite. She lives in New York City with her partner Ilana and their new baby.
MADELINE GEORGE is an award-winning playwright and author. Her plays include Hurricane Diane, The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence, Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, Precious Little, and The Zero Hour, and have been produced across the country. She was a founding member of 13P (Thirteen Playwrights, Inc.), the Obie-winning playwright’s collective, and is a resident playwright at New Dramatists. She won the 2016 Whiting Award and was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. George has also written two novels, published by Viking Children’s Book. Her first book, Looks, was one of Booklist’s 2008 Top Ten First Novels for Youth and a 2009 ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Her second book, The Difference Between You and Me, was a Kirkus Best Teen Book of 2012, a Junior Library Guild selection, and an ALA Rainbow List selection.
JACQUELINE GOLDFINGER is an award-winning playwright and librettist who seeks out unique collaborations, working across disciplines to create singular works of theater and opera. Her awards include: Yale Prize, Opera America Discovery Grant, and Generations Award. Her work has been seen nationally and internationally, including: The Kennedy Center, National Theatre/London, Voces8/London, Court Theatre/New Zealand, CATF, American Music Theatre Project at Northwestern, and Disquiet/Lisbon. She has written 10 published and produced full-length plays, 2 produced choral pieces, and has 3 operas in-development; (1) "Alice Tierney" composer Melissa Dunphy, Discovery Grant, Oberlin Opera Schlichting Commission, World Premiere 2023, (2) "Queen of the Goths" composer Kevin Laskey (PhD Penn), and (3) "Twa" composer Justine F. Chen (Discovery Grant Awardee for "Seven Sisters"). Her work has been supported by Yaddo, Millay Colony, and published by Edition Peters, Concord Theatricals, among others.
EMMA GOLDMAN-SHERMAN (she/they) is a playwright living in New York City. FUKT is a finalist with BAPF 2020 and was a finalist with Unicorn last year. This year Why Birds Fly is a finalist with Unicorn. Whorticulture was a finalist there two years ago. Counting in Sha'ab is available as a podcast on PlayingonAir.org and Abraham's Daughters is available as a podcast at TheParsnipShip.com. Experimental Bitch Presents has commissioned Emma to create Tanya's LIT CLIT with them. Things were almost produced, and then there was a pandemic. Produced on 4 continents, her work has been seen at Golden Thread, WP Theatre, New Georges, UNESCO's City of Literature Festival in Dunedin (NZ), EST/LA, Dixon Place, The Philadelphia Women's Theatre Festival, The New Ohio, Manhattan Theatre Source, All Out Arts at CSV, Circle Rep Lab, Guild Hall, New Circle Theatre Co, The Bernie Wohl Center, The Chain, The Wild Project, Capital Fringe, Alumnae Theatre Toronto, Short + Sweet Gold Coast and Sydney (AU), Seoul, Sasebo, Renegade N.O.W. Festival, The Loft at Marble Collegiate Church, Astoria First Presbyterian's Brown Tree Theatre, Union Theological Seminary, The Museum of Jewish Heritage, Yiddishe Folksbiene Theatre, Greenbriar Valley Theatre, Canal Cafe Theatre (London), Camilla's, The Culture Project, and others. ZEN & the Art of Mourning a Mother was a finalist for The Bridge Initiative's Bechdel Test Festival, 2019. WHORTICULTURE was a finalist in 2019 for Campfire Festival and was streamed by CyberTank in 2021 (produced by Quarantine Players). FUKT will happen at The Tank in 2022. Emma is published by Smith Scripts (UK), Next Stage Press, Smith & Kraus and Applause. Emma is a 3-time semi-finalist w/Cutting Ball's Risk is This Festival with Why Birds Fly, Abraham's Daughters and Whorticulture which was also short-listed with Owl & Cat in Melbourne. She earned an MFA from University of Iowa where she received the Normal Felton Fellowship and won the Richard Maibaum Award for plays addressing social justice for Antigone's Sister and received a Jane Chambers Award for Perfect Women. Residencies at Millay Colony for the Arts, Ragdale and twice at WordBridge where she returned a third year as a dramaturg. She has taught and been a dramaturg at the Great Plains Theatre Conference (2015, 2016). Emma was the Resident Dramaturg at 29th Street Playwrights Collective where she ran the Write Now Workshop from 2015 - 2021. Emma created and runs the global Zoom offerings BraveSpace.online for female and non-binary writers of all genres and the BraveNewWorkshop for new play development. Member: Honor Roll, LPTW, LMDA and the Dramatists Guild.
MAGDALENA GÓMEZ, the daughter of a Spanish Gitano (Romaní "gypsy") father and a Puerto Rican mother, was raised to be a storyteller. The intellectually gifted child of unschooled parents, she discovered the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and translations of Chinese women poets on her own at the age of eight in a South Bronx library and has been writing ever since. Ms. Gómez is an award-winning performance poet, playwright, performer, teaching artist and highly sought after keynote speaker and workshop facilitator. Her original series, Writing from the Belly, which she facilitated for women for over a decade at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was the training ground for the now yearly performance of Body Politics at the university. She was also on the faculty of New WORLD Theater’s 2050 Project for several years, and has had her plays and performance poems produced in venues such as: INTAR; Pregones; Puerto Rican Traveling Theater; Boston Playwright's Theater; HERE in NYC; Ko Festival; Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts; BING Arts Center; Factory Theater (Boston); BAAD! among others. She has received play development awards from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures; the Massachusetts Cultural Council; Arts International (in collaboration with the Augusta Savage Gallery) and an NEA Master Artist Award from Pregones Theater, among others. Dancing in My Cockroach Killers, a dramatization of her poems and monologues, was performed in 2013 to the critical acclaim of Off-Broadway audiences and was reprised to critical acclaim in 2014 at the Los Angeles Theater Center. The 2018 Washington D.C. Premiere at Gala Theater was brought back to PRTT off-Broadway that same year. She is the co-founder and artistic director of Teatro V!da, www.teatrovida.com the first Latin@ theater in Springfield, Massachusetts, and founder of the Ferocious Women’s Group bringing to public view voices of women and girls through writing and performance. For ten years, Ms. Gómez performed nationally as a jazz poet with the late baritone saxophonist, Fred Ho. Ms. Gomez is also a New England Public Radio commentator, national speaker and columnist with the Point of View Newspaper. She is the co-editor of Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions and Catharsis, the first multicultural, intergenerational and multi- genre anthology on bullying. A book of her poetry, Shameless Woman, was recently released by Red Sugarcane Press, NYC. Her role in the Nuyorican Literary movement was recently cited in In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, by scholar and poet Urayoán Noel. The University of Connecticut Storrs invited Ms. Gomez for the coveted honor of housing her literary archives at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.
DONETTA LAVININIA GRAYS is a Brooklyn-based playwright who proudly hails from Columbia, SC. Her plays include Where We Stand, Warriors Don’t Cry, Last Night and the Night Before, Laid to Rest, The Review or How to Eat Your Opposition, The New Normal, and The Cowboy is Dying. Donnetta is a Lucille Lortel, Drama League, and AUDELCO Award Nominee. She is the recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwright Award, National Theater Conference Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, Lilly Award, and Todd McNerney National Playwriting Award. She is the inaugural recipient of the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award. She is currently under commission from Steppenwolf, the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, WP Theater, and True Love Productions.
DAVID GREENSPAN’s plays include Jack, The Home Show Pieces, 2 Samuel 11, Etc., Dead Mother, She Stoops to Comedy, Go Back to Where You Are, The Argument, Jonas, and Coraline with Stephin Merritt. These have been produced most notably by the Public, Playwrights Horizons, The Foundry, Target Margin and Transport Group. Acting credits include premieres of works by David Adjmi, Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, William Hoffman, Terrence McNally, David Grimm, Kathleen Tolan, Harry Kondoleon, Mac Wellman, Richard Foreman, and solo renditions of Barry Conners’ The Patsy and Gertrude Stein’s Lecture, Plays. Guggenheim and Lortel fellowships, Alpert Award and five Obies.
VIRGINIA GRISE: From panzas to prisons, from street theatre to large-scale multimedia performances, from princess to chafa – Virginia Grise writes plays that are set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops, and lesbian bedrooms. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press), The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press) and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Durito (Autonomedia Press). Virginia is a recipient of the Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers' Award, the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing, and the Playwrights’ Center’s Jerome Fellowship. She is an alum of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab & the Women's Project Theatre Lab. In addition to plays, she has created a body of work that is interdisciplinary and includes multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site specific interventions, and community gatherings. As a curator, artist and activist she has facilitated organizing efforts amongst women, immigrant, Chicano, working class and queer youth. Virginia has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women’s prisons and in the juvenile correction system. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.
SARAH GUBBINS is a Chicago playwright. Her plays include Fair Use, In Loco Parentis, The Water Play, The Kid Thing (Edgarton Foundation New American Play Award), fml: how Carson McCullers saved my life and I am Bradley Manning. Her plays have been produced at the Steppenwolf Theatre, Actor’s Express, Next Theater, About Face Theater and Chicago Dramatists. Her plays have been developed at the Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, The Goodman Theatre, and The Playwrights’ Center of Minneapolis among others. Sarah is a Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists, an Artistic Associate at About Face Theatre, the 2010-2011 Carl J. Djerassi Playwriting Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a 2011-2012 Jerome Fellow. She holds a M.F.A. in Writing for the Screen + Stage from Northwestern University.
RYAN J. HADDAD is an actor, playwright, and autobiographical performer based in New York. His acclaimed solo play Hi, Are You Single? was presented in The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival and continues to tour the country. Other New York credits include My Straighties (Ars Nova/ANT Fest), Noor and Hadi Go to Hogwarts (Theater Breaking Through Barriers), and the cabaret Falling for Make Believe (Joe’s Pub/Under the Radar). Regional theatre: The Maids, Lucy Thurber’s Orpheus in the Berkshires (Williamstown Theatre Festival), and Hi, Are You Single? (Guthrie Theater, Cleveland Play House, Williamstown Theatre Festival). He has a recurring role on the Netflix series “The Politician.” Additional television: “Bull,” “Madam Secretary,” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” Haddad is a recipient of IAMA Theatre Company’s Shonda Rhimes Unsung Voices Playwriting Commission and Rising Phoenix Repertory’s Cornelia Street American Playwriting Award. His work has been developed with The Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, New York Theatre Workshop, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Noor Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Primary Stages, and Pride Plays. His writing has been published in the New York Times, Out Magazine, and American Theatre. Ryan is an alum of The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group and a former Queer|Art Performance and Playwriting Fellow, under the mentorship of Moe Angelos. @ryanjhaddad and ryanjhaddad.com.
NICK HADIKWA MWALUKO: Black African, trans, queer, nb, Tanzanian-American NICK HADIKWA MWALUKO is a third culture queer raised in East and central Africa who currently lives in the United States. Nick is a nominated member of the nationally-accredited Playwright Foundations' RPI, Resident Playwright Initiative. Nick was a member of The Public Theater's (New York City) Emerging Writers' Group (EWG), Crowded Fire Writers' Lab (San Francisco), and countless other residencies. Nick has also dramaturged for the National Conservatory Theater Center (San Francisco). Nick graduated Magna Cum Laude from Columbia University (B.A.) and was a Point Scholar (largest global LGBTQIA+ scholarship foundation) during Nick's entire MFA at Columbia University. Some of Nick’s award-winning plays include Waafrika 1-2-3, They/Them/Theirs, Silence Is A Sound, Asymmetrical We, Blueprint for a Lesbian Planet, Brotherly Love, Good Grief, Trailer Park Tundra, Once A Man Always A Man, Mama Afrika, Queering MacBeth, Life Is About the Kill, Homeless in the Afterlife, Ata, 37, S.T.A.R: Marsha P. Johnson, Jizz, and others. Nick's plays have been produced in New York City, New Jersey, Florida, Berkeley, San Francisco, Wisconsin, Paris, South Africa, Italy and other countries.
MIRANDA ROSE HALL (she / her / hers) is a playwright from Baltimore, MD. Her plays include Plot Points in Our Sexual Development (LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater, finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Drama), The Hour of Great Mercy (Diversionary Theater, 2019 San Diego Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Play), A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (upcoming Baltimore Center Stage), The Kind Ones (upcoming Magic Theatre), and Menstruation: A Period Piece. She is currently under commission from LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater, Yale Repertory Theater, and Playwrights Horizons Soundstage, and in 2020 she was honored with a Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. She has also developed her work with New York Theater Workshop, The Playwright's Realm, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, We the Women / Center Theatre Group, Baltimore Center Stage, The Kennedy Center, National New Play Network, and Woolly Mammoth. She is a founding member of LubDub Theatre Co., a New York-based physical theater company. Miranda has taught at Georgetown University, Wesleyan University, and Macalester College. She holds a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama.
JOSHUA HARMON’s plays include Bad Jews (Roundabout Underground; Roundabout/Laura Pels; West End), Significant Other (Roundabout; Broadway/Booth Theatre), Admissions (Lincoln Center Theater; West End), and Skintight (Roundabout). His plays have been produced across the country at Studio Theatre, Geffen Playhouse, Speakeasy, Actor’s Express, The Magic, and Theater Wit, among others, and internationally in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and throughout the U.K. He is a two-time MacDowell fellow and an Associate Artist at Roundabout. Graduate of Juilliard.
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.
JORDAN HARRISON was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Marjorie Prime, which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum and had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons. A film adaptation, directed by Michael Almereyda, premiered in the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Jordan's play Maple and Vine premiered in the 2011 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville and went on to productions at American Conservatory Theatre and Playwrights Horizons, among others. Other plays include The Grown-Up (Humana Festival), Doris to Darlene, a cautionary valentine (Playwrights Horizons), Amazons and their Men (Clubbed Thumb), Act A Lady (Humana Festival), Finn in the Underworld (Berkeley Rep), Futura (Portland Center Stage/NAATCO), Kid-Simple (Humana Festival), The Museum Play (WET), and a musical, Suprema (O'Neill Music Theatre Conference). Jordan has two new plays premiering Off-Broadway in the '17-'18 season: The Amateurs at the Vineyard Theatre, and Log Cabin at Playwrights Horizons. Jordan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, the Horton Foote Prize, the Kesselring Prize, the Roe Green Award from Cleveland Play House, the Heideman Award, a Theater Masters Innovative Playwright Award, the Loewe Award for Musical Theater, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships, a NYSCA grant, and a NEA/TCG Residency with The Empty Space Theater. His children's musical, The Flea and the Professor, won the Barrymore Award for Best Production after premiering at the Arden Theatre. A graduate of Stanford University and the Brown MFA program, Jordan is an alumnus of New Dramatists. For three seasons, he was a writer and producer for the Netflix original series "Orange is the New Black."
IKE HOLTER’s play Lottery Day was produced at the Goodman Theatre in 2019. Additional Chicago credits include Red Rex (Steep Theatre); Rightlynd (Victory Gardens Theatre); The Light Fantastic, Prowess and Exit Strategy (Jackalope Theatre); The Wolf at the End of the Block (Teatro Vista); Sender (A Red Orchid Theatre); and Hit the Wall (The Inconvenience). Off-Broadway credits include Exit Strategy (Primary Stages); and Hit the Wall (Barrow Street). Regional credits include Put Your House in Order (La Jolla Playhouse). TV credits include Fosse/Verdon (FX). Ike is developing a project with Tribeca Productions/Netflix and the HAROLD series for Wayfarer Studios. He is a winner of the WGA Award for Fosse/Verdon and the Windham-Campbell Prize for playwriting. IkeHolter.com
SAMUEL D. HUNTER’s plays include The Whale (Drama Desk Award, Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, GLAAD Media Award, Drama League and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Play), A Bright New Boise (Obie Award, Drama Desk nomination for Best Play), The Few, A Great Wilderness, Rest, Pocatello, Lewiston, Clarkston, and most recently, The Healing and The Harvest. He is the recipient of a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, a 2012 Whiting Writers Award, the 2013 Otis Guernsey New Voices Award, the 2011 Sky Cooper Prize, the 2008 PONY/Lark Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Idaho. His plays have been produced in New York at Playwrights Horizons, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Clubbed Thumb and Page 73, and around the country at such theaters as Seattle Rep, South Coast Rep, Victory Gardens, Williamstown Theater Festival, The Old Globe, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Denver Center Theatre Company, Marin Theater Company, and elsewhere. His work has been developed at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Seven Devils, and PlayPenn. A published anthology of his work, including The Whale and A Bright New Boise, is available from TCG books. He is a member of New Dramatists, an Ensemble Playwright at Victory Gardens, a member of Partial Comfort Productions, and was a 2013 Resident Playwright at Arena Stage. A native of northern Idaho, Sam lives in NYC. He holds degrees in playwriting from NYU, The Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and Juilliard.
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.
JAMES IJAMES is a Philadelphia based actor and playwright. He has appeared regionally at The Arden Theatre Company, The Philadelphia Theatre Company, The Wilma Theatre, Baltimore Center Stage and Interact Theatre Company. James is a founding member of Orbiter 3 Playwright Producing Collective, a member of the InterAct Core Writers Group and a mentor for The Foundry. James’ plays include The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, Moon Man Walk, WHITE, Kill Move Paradise, The Threshing Floor, and Osiris:Redux. ...Miz Martha was developed with PlayPenn and the Wilma Theater and received its world premiere with Flashpoint Theater. Moon Man Walk was world premiered with Orbiter 3 Playwright Collective. His play WHITE was apart of the 2015 PlayPenn New Play Conference and the 2015 Gulfshore Playhouse New Works Festival. James is a recipient of F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Artist, two Barrymores for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Play for Superior Donuts and Angels in America and a Barrymore for Best Direction of a Play for The Brother Size. Is an Independence Foundation Fellow and he is a 2015 Pew Fellow. James is the 2015 recipient of the Terrence McNally New Play Award for WHITE and the 2015 Kesselring Honorable Mention Prize for ... Miz Martha. He received a BA in Drama from Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA and a MFA in Acting from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. James is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University and resides in South Philadelphia.
GERALDINE ELIZABETH INOA is a playwright and screenwriter. Her play SCRAPS had its world premiere production at the Flea Theater in New York City as part of its 2018/19 season, marking her professional debut. SCRAPS made its West Coast premiere at The Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles during summer 2019. As a playwright, she is an alumnus of The Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group and the inaugural recipient of The Shonda Rhimes Unsung Voices Playwriting Commission. She is a L. Arnold Weissberg New Play Award finalist, a P73 Playwriting Fellowship finalist, and a twice-named Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference semifinalist. Her work has been developed at the Atlantic Theater Company, the Labyrinth Theater Company, and the Victory Gardens Theater. TV credits include: AMC’s The Walking Dead (S9, S10) & CW’s Charmed (S3). She holds a B.A. from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is a Gates Millennium Scholar.
EXAL IRAHETA (he/his) is a Chicago-based Salvi-American playwright & screenwriter by way of Houston, TX. Sometimes humorous and often uncomfortable, his work explores the intersections of belonging, family, queerness, Latinidad, violence, and sexuality. Exal is a 2020/2021 Goodman Theatre's Playwrights Unit member and a selected playwright in the 2018 Fornés Playwriting Workshop. In 2019 his play They Could Give No Name was chosen for Victory Gardens' Ignition Festival and an honorable mention in the American Playwriting Foundation's 2019 Relentless Award. They Could Give No Name was also a finalist in the 2020 National Playwrights Conference and the 2020 Judith Royer Excellence in Playwriting Award. Additionally, his play Rules of a Closed Door was a semi-finalist of Western Michigan University's Activate: Midwest New Play Festival. It also received an excerpt reading at The Goodman Theater. His short play Open Venas was produced in Theater Masters' 2019 Take Ten New York Short Play Festival and The Untold Collectiv's 2019 Latinx Scratch festival (London, England.) Exal has collaborated with Chicago theatre companies Nothing Without a Company and Random Acts Chicago. Recently, Exal was featured in the May/June 2020 issue of American Theatre Magazine as part of its "People to Watch" list. Exal's filmmaking and screenwriting have brought him to work with several Chicago-based filmmakers and organizations as an instructor, videographer, assistant director, and video editor. His original TV pilots have received staged readings at The iO Theater, Annoyance Theatre, and The Crowd Theater and placed in competitions. Exal earned an MFA from Northwestern University's Writing for the Screen and Stage program and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Film & Video Production. On the weekends, Exal enjoys walks with his husband Chris, while wishing he could bring his gray and white domestic short-hair cat, Ezra, along.
DANIEL K. ISAAC is a Korean American actor and writer born and raised in Southern California, based in New York City. You can currently see him on the small screen as ‘Ben Kim’ in Showtime's “Billions.” Daniel co-wrote and stars in the short film/pilot presentation, “According To My Mother.” The project was selected for IFP Film Week and the inaugural Sundance New Voices Lab and was an Official Selection at ITVFest, Newfest, Outfest & Outfest Fusion, CAAMfest, SeriesFest (where it was awarded Best Actress), and New York Television Festival (Best Drama and Best Actor). Daniel’s full-length plays include FULLERTON (2020 O'Neill Finalist), ONCE UPON A (korean) TIME (2019 O’Neill Finalist), [untitled gay sex and conversion therapy play], and OR OR OR &&& (available as a podcast recording on The Parsnip Ship). Short plays include Batman and Superman Go To Disneyland (F*It Club); Relentlessly Gay Brunch, Homos Away From Home, The First American Chess Congress of 1857, A North Korean Christmas Carol, An Intelligent Woman Does Nothing For Me (EST); A Midsummer Night’s Wall (Leviathan); A Little TV Life (The Tank). Daniel’s work has been developed at Ma-Yi Theater Company, New York Theatre Workshop, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Page73’s Interstate73, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood, Queens Theatre, The Tank, TheatreC, Leviathan Lab, and Lambda Literary. Training: UCSD, BADA.
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.
C. JULIAN JIMÉNEZ is a Queer, Puerto Rican and Dominican playwright. He holds an MFA in Acting from The New School for Drama. Playwriting awards include: New Dramatist Residency (Class of 2025), 2019/2020 Rita Goldberg Playwrights' Workshop Fellow at The Lark, 2017 & 2018 Pipeline Theatre Company PlayLab, 2018 LaGuardia Community College’s LGBTQ History Project Grant, 2015 Queens Arts Council Grant, 2009 Public Theater Emerging Writers Group, and 2014 Best New Work Motif Award. Productions include: Man Boobs (Pride Films & Plays, 2011), Nico was a Fashion Model (Counter-Productions, 2013), Animals Commit Suicide (First Floor Theater, 2015), Locusts Have No King (INTAR, 2016), Bundle of Sticks (INTAR, 2020), and Alligator Mouth, Tadpole Ass (Theatre Rhinoceros, 2020). He wrote the book for LatinXoxo at Joe's Pub in 2019. Other plays include anOTHER, ¡OSO FABULOSO! & The Bear Backs, Julio Down by the Schoolyard, and Bruise & Thorn (2018 PlayPenn Conference). He is a co-producer and co-writer of the hit web series, Bulk, and an Associate Professor of Theatre at Queensborough Community College.
C.A. JOHNSON is a Brooklyn-based playwright originally from Metairie, Louisiana. Her plays include ALL THE NATALIE PORTMANS (MCC Theater), THIRST (2017 Kilroys List, CATF), THE CLIMB (Cherry Lane Mentor Project), AN AMERICAN FEAST (NYU Playwrights Horizons Theater School), and I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW. Most recently she was the Tow Playwright in Residence at MCC Theater. She was previously the 2018 P73 Playwriting Fellow, The Lark's 2016-17 Van Lier Fellow, a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a member of The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm, A Core Writer at The Playwrights Center, a member of The Civilians R&D Group, , 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
DANIEL ALEXANDER JONES is a performance artist, writer and director. Audiences and critics across the United States, and abroad, have acclaimed Jones’s interdisciplinary work. His performances onstage, on record, and in digital media as his alter-ego, Jomama Jones, include Radiate (Soho Rep, and national tour), Night Flowers (JACK), the albums Six Ways Home, Radiate and Lone Star, and a series of annual online New Year’s Messages. His performance pieces and plays include Blood:Shock:Boogie, Phoenix Fabrik, Bel Canto, Cab and Lena, and The Book of Daniel. Jones is developing, both, An Integrator’s Manual (FUSEBOX, and La MaMa, etc.) and Jomama Jones: Flowering as multi-platform projects over the next two years. Daniel’s dynamic community of collaborators includes Helga Davis, Sharon Bridgforth, Jane Saks, Will Davis, Kyla Searle, Samora Pinderhughes and Dr. Bobby Halvorson. Daniel has directed world premiere productions of pieces by Dr. E. Patrick Johnson, Erik Ehn, Shay Youngblood and Renita Martin, among others. Daniel Alexander Jones was named a 2015 Doris Duke Artist; he received the Alpert Award in Theatre, and was a fellow at Occidental College, NYU/Hemispheric Institute, and the ESB Institute at Columbia College. Daniel was an inaugural Creative Capital Artist, and the MAP Fund, the Jerome Foundation, and McKnight Foundation, among others, have supported his work. Daniel was a Resident Playwright with New Dramatists, a Core Member of the Playwrights’ Center, and has lectured or taught at numerous colleges, universities, theatres and arts organizations nationally. He heads the Playwriting track at Fordham University, where he is an Associate Professor of Theatre. Daniel lives in NYC. danielalexanderjones.com
HANSOL JUNG is a playwright from South Korea. Productions include Wild Goose Dreams (The Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse), Wolf Play (NNPN Rolling Premiere: Artists Rep, Mixed Blood, Company One), Cardboard Piano (Humana Festival at ATL), Among the Dead (Ma-Yi Theatre), and No More Sad Things (Sideshow, Boise Contemporary). Commissions from The Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Seattle Repertory Theatre, National Theatre in UK, Playwrights Horizons, Artists Repertory Theater, Ma-Yi Theatre and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her work has been developed at Royal Court, New York Theatre Workshop, Hedgebrook, Berkeley Repertory, Sundance Theatre Lab, O’Neill Theater Center, and the Lark. Hansol is the recipient of the Hodder Fellowship, Whiting Award, Helen Merrill Award, Page 73 Fellowship, Lark’s Rita Goldberg Fellowship, NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship, MacDowell Artist Residency, and International Playwrights Residency at Royal Court. She is a proud member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, NYTW’s Usual Suspects, and The New Class of Kilroys. MFA: Yale.
EMILY KACZMAREK’s [pronounced KAZ-mer-ack] plays and musicals have been developed/produced at the Geffen Playhouse (upcoming), 5th Avenue Theatre, Second Stage Theater, American Conservatory Theater, Northern Stage, Village Theatre, WP Theater, Prospect Theater Company, Musical Theatre Factory and others. She has been an artist in residence at SPACE on Ryder Farm, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center, Goodspeed Musicals, and the Orchard Project. Emily received a 2019 Kilroys List Honorable Mention (Sam & Lizzie) and is a Jonathan Larson Grant Recipient, a National Playwrights Conference Finalist, a Kleban Prize Finalist, and a Princess Grace Award Finalist. Emily is a writer/producer on MONSTERLAND for Annapurna/Hulu and STAIRCASE for HBOMax. And whenever possible, she sings.
STEPHEN KARAM is the Tony Award-winning author of The Humans, Sons of the Prophet and Speech & Debate. For his work he’s received two Drama Critics Circle Awards, an OBIE Award and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. Stephen recently directed his first feature film, a rethought version of The Humans for A24 films, to be released in 2021. He wrote a film adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull starring Annette Bening, which was released by Sony Picture Classics. His adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard premiered on Broadway as part of Roundabout’s 2016 season. Recent honors include the inaugural Horton Foote Playwriting Award, the inaugural Sam Norkin Drama Desk Award, two Outer Critics Circle Awards, a Lucille Lortel Award, Drama League Award, and Hull-Warriner Award. Stephen teaches graduate playwriting at The New School. He is a graduate of Brown University and grew up in Scranton, PA.
MJ KAUFMAN: MJ Kaufman is a playwright and screenwriter from Portland, OR currently living in New York City. Their plays have been seen at the Public Theater, WP Theater, National Asian American Theater Company, Clubbed Thumb, Colt Coeur, Williamstown Theater Festival, InterAct Theater, Yale School of Drama and numerous other theaters and schools around the country as well as in Russian in Moscow and in Australia. Their work has been developed by the Lark Play Development Center, the Playwrights Realm, Page73 and New York Theater Workshop among others. MJ received the 2017 Helen Merrill Emerging Writers Award, 2013 ASCAP Cole Porter Prize in Playwriting, the 2013 Global Age Project Prize, and the 2010 Jane Chambers Prize in Feminist Theatre. MJ has held residencies at the New Museum, MacDowell Colony, and SPACE on Ryder Farm and is currently a resident playwright at New Dramatists. MJ has been a member of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers’ Group, WP Theater Lab, a core playwright at InterAct Theatre and a playwriting fellow at the Huntington Theater. An alum of Wesleyan University and Yale School of Drama, MJ has taught playwriting at Fordham University, Wesleyan University, SUNY Purchase College, the University of the Arts and as a teaching fellow at Yale College. MJ curated the 2016 and 2017 seasons of Trans Theater Fest at The Brick and, along with Kit Yan and Cece Suazo, founded Trans Lab Fellowship, a program to support emerging transgender theater artists. MJ has also written for Netflix and is currently developing a project with Anonymous Content.
SHANNON TL KEARNS is a transgender man who's playwriting is obsessed with big questions told through small stories. He is committed to work by and for marginalized communities, using writing to create a new future for all of us. He is the founder and Artistic Director of Uprising Theatre Company in Minneapolis, MN. Shannon is a recipient of the Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowship in 20/21. He is a Lambda Literary Fellow for 2019. He was awarded a spot in the HBMG Foundations’ Winter Playwright Retreat in 2018 and 2019. He has participated in Pillsbury House Theatre’s Chicago Avenue Project writing plays for and with children. He was a finalist for the Equity Library Theatre of Chicago’s Reading Series, the 2019 TransLab, and the American Stages 2019 New Play Festival. He was a semi-finalist for SPACE on Ryder farm in 2020. He also teaches storytelling and playwriting for youth and adults. Shannon’s plays include Body and Blood, in a stand of dying trees, Line of Sight, Twisted Deaths, The Resistance of My Skin, and Who Has Eyes To See.
LEANNA KEYES is a playwright & producer based in Memphis, Tennessee and the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Playwright in Residence at Crosstown Arts in Memphis during spring 2019. Valiant Theatre commissioned her in 2020, which resulted in the premiere of Love Serving Love at their annual new works festival in January. Her play Doctor Voynich and Her Children, an abortion romance family drama, was produced at Uprising Theatre Company in Minneapolis in March 2020). It was going to be produced at Linfield College in Oregon in May, but you can imagine what happened to that idea. In Chicago, her short play You’re My Person premiered at the Violet Surprise Femmeslash Festival at Otherworld Theatre Company in August 2019. Her play Legal-Tender Loving Care was produced by Fuse Theatre in California in June 2019. In 2018, her play Doctor Voynich and Her Children received collegiate productions at Rhodes College and at Stanford University. Previously produced plays including God Herself Could Not Sink This Ship in 2014 and The Kilogram Play in 2013. She also co-wrote The Real World: Stanford with Olivia Haas, which was produced annually from 2015 to 2017. Her plays have been studied at universities around the country, including Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon, Rhodes College, Linfield College, the University of Kansas, and Western Carolina University. In 2017, her work was featured at Carnegie Mellon in the curriculum of “American Women Playwrights of the 20th and 21st Centuries.”
CLAIRE KIECHEL is a LA-based film and TV writer, former New York-based theater maker. Her plays include Sophia (Alley Theatre All-New Festival 2019); Paul Swan is Dead & Gone (The Civilians at Torn Page); the haunted (City Theatre's Momentum Festival, additional development at Seattle Rep); Pilgrims (The Gift Theatre; Alley All New Reading Series; The Lark’s Playwrights’ Week 2016; The Kilroys' The List 2016); Lulu Is Hungry with composer Avi Amon at Ars Nova’s ANT Fest 2016; and Some Dark Places of the Earth at The New School for Drama. She has received commissions from Actors Theatre of Louisville, South Coast Rep, and the Alley Theatre, and has a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from the New School for Drama. She was a writer for Netflix's second season of THE OA and the HBO series WATCHMEN. She is currently a co-producer for the adaptation of Madeline Miller’s CIRCE for HBOMax, developing a podcast for Gimlet/Spotify, and is writing two different soon to be announced TV projects.
BASIL KREIMENDAHL is a resident playwright at New Dramatists. His plays have won several awards, including the Rella Lossy Playwright Award and a National Science Award at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Kreimendahl has been commissioned by Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s American Revolutions Program, and by Actors Theatre of Louisville. We’re Gonna Be Okay had its world premiere at the 2017 Humana Festival. Kreimendahl's play Orange Julius was developed at the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and had its New York premiere at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, in a co-production with P73. Sidewinders had its world premier at Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco. Kreimendahl’s plays have also been produced or developed by New York Theatre Workshop, American Theater Company, Victory Gardens Theater, Ryder Farm, The Lark, La Jolla Playhouse, and Labyrinth Theater Company amongst others around the country. They have been a Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow and a McKnight Fellow and received an Art Meets Activism Grant for work with the trans community in Kentucky. Kreimendahl’s work has been published by Dramatists Play Service, Dramatic Publishing, TCG and HowlRound. They received their M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 2013.
LISA KRON has been writing and performing theater since coming to New York from Michigan in 1983. Her plays include Fun Home, a musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel written with composer Jeanine Tesori, which will open on Broadway in April of 2015, premiered at Public Theater in 2013, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and received the Lortel, Drama Critics Circle, Obie and Outer Critics Circle awards for Best Musical. Other plays include The Ver**zon Play (2011 Humana Festival); In The Wake (Lilly Award, inclusion in Best Plays of 2010-2011 Yearbook); Well (Best Plays of 2003-2004 Yearbook, 2006 Tony nom. for Best Actress); and 2.5 Minute Ride (Obie, L.A. Drama-Logue and GLAAD Media Awards). As an actor she began her career in the ANTA Repertory Company under the artistic direction of Michael Kahn, and then spent many glorious and formative years treading the boards in all of the finest low-rent downtown theaters and clubs. Acting roles include Mrs. Mi-Tzu and Mrs. Yang in the Foundry Theater’s acclaimed production of Good Person of Szechuan (Lortel Award, Outstanding Featured Actress), The Ancient in Spain at M.C.C.; and dance critic Walter Terry in Richard Move’s Martha @... The 1963 Interview at DTW, NYLA and the Singapore International Arts Festival. Honors include Guggenheim, Sundance, Lark, and MacDowell fellowships, a Doris Duke Performing Artists Award, a Cal Arts/Alpert Award, a residency from the American New Voice Play Institute at Arena Stage, the Helen Merrill Award, and grants from the Creative Capital and NYFA. Lisa is a proud founding member of the legendary OBIE and Bessie-Award-winning collaborative theater company The Five Lesbian Brothers, whose plays continue to be performed by companies around the world and are regularly taught in Theater, Performance, and LGBT Studies programs. She currently serves on the boards of the McDowell Colony and the Lilly Awards, and the Council of the Dramatists Guild of America.
TONY KUSHNER: Born in New York City in 1956, and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Tony Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, ANGELS IN AMERICA: A GAY FANTASIA ON NATIONAL THEMES. His other plays include A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY, SLAVS!, HYDROTAPHIA, HOMEBODY/KABUL, and CAROLINE, OR CHANGE, the musical for which he wrote book and lyrics, with music by composer Jeanine Tesori. Kushner has translated and adapted Pierre Corneille’s THE ILLUSION, S.Y. Ansky’s THE DYBBUK, Bertolt Brecht’s THE GOOD PERSON OF SEZUAN and MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN, and the English-language libretto for the children’s opera BRUNDIBÁR by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’ film of Angels in America and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. In 2012 he wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s movie Lincoln. His screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award, and won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, Boston Society of Film Critics Award, Chicago Film Critics Award, and several others. His books include But the Giraffe: A Curtain Raising and Brundibar: The Libretto, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon. His recent work includes a collection of one-act plays entitled TINY KUSHNER, and THE INTELLIGENT HOMOSEXUAL’S GUIDE TO CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM WITH A KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES. In addition, a revival of ANGELS IN AMERICA ran Off-Broadway at the Signature Theater and won the Lucille Lortel Award in 2011 for Outstanding Revival. Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement, and the 2012 National Medal of Arts, among many others. CAROLINE, OR CHANGE, produced at the National Theatre of Great Britain, received the EVENING STANDARD Award, the London Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Olivier Award for Best Musical. In September 2008, Tony Kushner became the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the largest theater award in the US. He is the subject of a documentary film, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.
HARUNA LEE is an Obie Award-winning Taiwanese/Japanese/American theater maker, educator, and community steward whose work is rooted in a liberation-based healing practice. They are committed to promoting arts activism and emergent strategies for the theater through ethical and process-based collaborations that challenge systems and legacies of power, while inviting the fullness of marginalized bodies and the complexity of lived experiences to this practice. Lee’s Off Broadway transfer of their play Suicide Forest (The New York Times Critic's Pick) ended early due to the pandemic, and is published by 53rd State Press. They were a member of the 2019 artEquity cohort, and is a co-founder and lead facilitator for the Women-Trans-Femme-Non Binary Asian Diasporic Performance Makers Potluck. During their MacDowell residency, they finished work on the pilot episode of Opening Up, and continued work on a new play about the death of a matriarch that impacts three generations of a Japanese family, and the traditional funeral rites that connect the living with those that have passed. They also conducted extensive research on a project about their polyamorous practice of love and intimacy, and how this is deeply influenced by their immigrant upbringing; examining how grief, isolation, and silence show up as sexualized narratives in the Asian American body, and the practice of polyamory as an act of radical revision. Lee received the FCA Grants to Artist Award and the Bret Adams and Paul Reisch Foundation's Ollie Award in 2021, and an Obie Award for the conception and playwriting of Suicide Forest in 2020.
ALEX LIN (she/her/hers) is an award-nominated Asian-American playwright, screenwriter, and journalist. As an ex-STEM kid from Bergen County, her work is powered by a drive to bridge the gap between the science and entertainment industries. Her plays have been developed and produced with Women's Theatre Festival, The Rude Mechanicals, Central Square Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville (PTC), University of Idaho, The COOP, and Pace University. She is a 2020 Pass the Pen nominee at Ashland New Plays Festival, a 2020 ScreenCraft Stage Play Semifinalist, and a 2021 Lanford Wilson American New Plays Festival Semifinalist. Lin is also a member of The COOP’s ClusterF**K, Page Break, and the 20/21 Asian American Arts Alliance Virtual Residency. As a space journalist with A24 Film’s media outlet, Supercluster, she’s had the privilege of working with former astronauts, NASA executives, Hollywood actors, writers, and directors - as well as SpaceX, Boeing, and Netflix to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and the popular culture it influences. She is also an executive producer for the Supercluster series, REAL ASTRONAUT / PLAY ASTRONAUT, bringing real life and silver screen astronauts together in conversation. Lin has also covered several spaceflight missions, including DM-2 and Crew-1. As such, Lin is a three-time Reddit r/space #1 front-pager, which is like the bare minimum at this point considering how much time she wasted scrolling through r/AITA as a neurotic teen.
YILONG LIU is a New York-based bilingual playwright and screenwriter, originally from Chongqing, China. He is a Kennedy Center Paula Vogel Playwriting Award winner, a Lambda Literary Award winner, and was recently named one of the Ten Contemporary Asian and Pacific Islander American Playwrights You Should Know by ArtsBoston. Currently, he is under commissions from Audible's Emerging Playwrights Fund and EST/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project. A proud member of Ensemble Studio Theatre's Obie Award-winning playwrights group Youngblood, a Core Writer at Playwrights Center, and a two-time resident of SPACE on Ryder Farm. His works include The Book of Mountains and Seas (Kennedy Center Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award, New Conservatory Theatre Center), June is The First Fall (Kumu Kahua Theatre, Yangtze Rep/New Ohio Theatre, Original Works Publishing), Joker (Po’okela Award for Best New Play, Kumu Kahua Theatre, FringeNYC, National Queer Theatre), Flood in The Valley, a Bilingual Folk Musical (Beijing Tianqiao Theatre Center, Gung Ho Project), PrEP Play, or Blue Parachute (upcoming rolling premieres), and Good Enemy (Audible, Ojai Playwrights Festival). When he’s not writing, he’s usually cooking, people watching, or compulsively liking cat pics on Instagram. BA: Beijing Normal University. MFA: University of Hawaii.
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.
MATTHEW LÓPEZ’s play The Inheritance, directed by Stephen Daldry, premiered at London’s Young Vic in 2018, transferred to the West End and opened on Broadway last year. The play is an ambitious two-part, seven-hour epic centered around a group of gay New Yorkers, twenty years after the height of the AIDS epidemic. His plays The Whipping Man and The Legend of Georgia McBride have been produced off-Broadway. He has also written for Netflix and developed work with Plan B Entertainment and Working Title Films.
DONJA R. LOVE (he/him/his) is Black, Queer, HIV-Positive, and thriving. A Philly native, his work examines the forced absurdity of life for those who identify as Black, Queer, and HIV-Positive – a diverse intersection filled with eloquent stories that challenge the white supremacist, heteronormative structures that exist in American culture. He's the recipient of the Antonyo's inaugural Langston Hughes Award, the Helen Merrill Award, the Laurents/Hatcher Award and the Princess Grace Playwriting Award. Other honors include The Lark’s Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, The Playwrights Realm’s Writing Fellowship, and the Philadelphia Adult Grand Slam Poetry Champion. 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. Plays include soft, one in two (The New Group), Fireflies (Atlantic Theater Company), Sugar in Our Wounds (Manhattan Theatre Club, Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle Nominations), and The Trade. He’s a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at The Juilliard School.
RACHEL LYNETT (she/they) is a Black/Afro-Latine playwright and producer.. So far in 2021, her plays have been featured at Theatre Lab, Magic Theatre, True Colors, Florida Studio Theatre, Transformation Theatre, Edgewood College, and as part of the Amplified Series at Indiana University, Bloomington. Rachel Lynett is the 2021 recipient of the Yale Drama Prize for their play, Apologies to Lorraine Hansberry (You Too August Wilson) and their plays Last Night and HE DID IT made the 2020 Kilroy’s List. Rachel Lynett is also the Artistic Director of Rachel Lynett Theatre Company and Executive Director of Page by Page.
TAYLOR MAC (who uses “judy”—lowercase sic—as a gender pronoun) is a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, performance artist, director and producer. Mac's many works have garnered judy a MacArthur Fellow, a Tony Award nomination, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist citation, the Kennedy Prize, a NY Drama Critics Circle Award, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, the Herb Alpert in Theater, The Booth Award, the Peter Zeisler Memorial Award, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, two Bessies, two Obies, two Helpmann’s, and an Ethyl Eichelberger Award. An alumnus of New Dramatists, judy is currently the resident playwright at the Here Arts Center.
JACK MACCARTHY is a nonbinary creatrix whose work centers sex-positivity, dance, and flawed queers having big feelings. Indie Theater Hall of Fame (nytheatre.com person of the year), PoNY nominee. Plays: Honors Students (Wild Project, Kilroys Honorable Mention, EST Unfiltered), Mrs. Mayfield's Fifth-Grade Class of '93 20-Year Reunion ("a lot of fun " -The New York Times), Baby Mama: One Woman's Quest to Give Her Child to Gay People (Ensemble Studio Theatre and Edinburgh Fringe, viewed over 42,000 times on YouTube, two NYIT Award nominations), Magic Trick (winner: Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award, Lotos Foundation Prize in the Arts and Sciences), The Foreplay Play (two NYIT Award nominations), Ampersand: A Romeo & Juliet Story (twenty Looking Glass Forum Awards, FringeNYC "Outstanding Performance"), The All-American Genderf*ck Cabaret ("f*cking brilliant" -Kate Bornstein). Executive Artistic Director of Caps Lock Theatre, Associate Artistic Director-at-Large of The Brick, alum of Youngblood and founding member of Lather/Rinse/Repeat. jackmaccarthy.com
EDUARDO MACHADO was born in Cuba and came to the United States when he was nine. Mr. Machado served as the head of playwriting at Columbia University and the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has also taught at The Mark Taper Forum in L.A, and The Public Theatre in NY. He is the former Artistic Director of INTAR Theatre in New York City. He is the author of over fifty plays, including, CELIA AND FIDEL, THE COOK, HAVANA IS WAITING, THE MODERN LADIES OF GUANABACOA, FABIOLA, IN THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE, BROKEN EGGS, ONCE REMOVED, A BURNING BEACH, AND STEVIE WANTS TO PLAY THE BLUES. His plays have been produced at The Arena Stage in D.C., Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Goodman Theatre, Hartford Stage, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Mark Taper Forum, Long Wharf Theatre, American Place Theatre, The Cherry Lane Theatre, INTAR Theatre, Theater for the New City, and Repertorio Español, among many others. His plays have also been produced in South America and Europe. Mr. Machado’s television credits include Executive Story Editor on Season 2 of the Starz drama Magic City, and Executive Story Editor on two seasons of the HBO television show HUNG. He has written pilots for AMC, “Identity” 2020, Starz, “Havana Red” 2018, and Amazon, “Tropicana” 2017. He wrote and directed the film EXILES IN NEW YORK, which played at the A.F.I Film Festival, South by SouthWest, The Santa Barbara Film Festival and The Latin American International Film Festival in Havana, Cuba. His plays are published by Samuel French and TCG, TASTES LIKE CUBA: AN EXILE’S HUNGER FOR HOME, a food memoir by Eduardo Machado and Michael Domitrovich, is published by Gotham Press.
MONA MANSOUR’s play BEGINNING DAYS OF TRUE JUBILATION, directed by Scott Illingworth and conceived with her company SOCIETY, was part of New Ohio’s Ice Factory Digital Festival. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY was to make its NYC debut in March 2020 at the Public Theater, directed by Mark Wing-Davey; the production was postponed due to covid-19, and will resume at a future date. WE SWIM, WE TALK, WE GO TO WAR premiered at Golden Thread in 2018 (dir. Evren Odcikin). THE VAGRANT TRILOGY was presented at Mosaic Theater in June 2018 (dir. Wing-Davey). Of the trilogy: THE HOUR OF FEELING (dir. Wing-Davey) premiered at the Humana Festival at ATL, and an Arabic translation was presented at NYU Abu Dhabi, as part of its Arab Voices Festival in 2016. URGE FOR GOING: Public Theater (dir. Hal Brooks) and Golden Thread (dir. Odcikin). THE VAGRANT was commissioned by the Public and workshopped at the 2013 Sundance Theater Institute. THE WAY WEST: Labyrinth (dir. Mimi O’Donnell); Steppenwolf (dir. Amy Morton). UPCOMING: UNSEEN, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (dir. Odcikin). Mona was a member of the Public’s Emerging Writers Group. With Tala Manassah she wrote DRESSING, part OF FACING OUR TRUTHS, commissioned by the New Black Festival. 2020 Kesselring Prize, 2020 Helen Merrill Award, 2012 Whiting Award. 2014 Middle East America Playwright Award, MacDowell Colony 2018, New Dramatists Class of 2021.
SARAH MANTELL: (she/they) Sarah's plays include Everything That Never Happened, The Good Guys, Tiny, and Fight Call. Her work has been produced and developed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Boston Court Pasadena, The Playwrights Realm, Artists Repertory Theatre, Seattle Rep, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, The Yale Cabaret, Great Plains Theatre Conference, and the Yale School of Drama among others. Sarah is under commission with Playwrights Horizons and Geva Theatre Center. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Wildacres, Jentel, and SPACE on Ryder Farm, a Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship, first runner-up for the Leah Ryan FEWW award, and was a two-time nominee for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award. Sarah has taught at Wesleyan University, Occidental College, SUNY Purchase, and New Haven's Cooperative Arts High School. She holds a BFA in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. She is also the inventor of Experimental Pie Day, loves this pen (0.4mm), and once, when she was little, re-illustrated her father's prized hardcover copy of Alice in Wonderland. He's never really gotten over it.
ROGER Q. MASON (he/they) is an award-winning writer, performer and educator. Mason's playwriting has been seen on Broadway at Circle in the Square (Circle Reading Series); Off/Off-Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, The Fire This Time Festival, New Group, American Theatre of Actors, Flea Theatre, and Access Theater; and regionally at McCarter Theatre, Victory Gardens, Chicago Dramatists, Steep Theatre, Serenbe Playhouse, EST/LA, Son of Semele, Coeurage Theatre Company and Skylight Theatre Company. Mason holds degrees from Princeton University, Middlebury College, and Northwestern University.
TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY is an acclaimed writer. His script In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue is the basis for the Oscar-winning film Moonlight directed by Barry Jenkins, for which McCraney and Jenkins won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He wrote the film High Flying Bird which premiered on Netflix directed by Steven Soderbergh. McCraney’s plays include MS. BLAKK FOR PRESIDENT (co-written with Tina Landau), The Brother/Sister Plays trilogy, Head of Passes, Wig Out!, and Choir Boy which was nominated for four Tony Awards. McCraney is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, the Whiting Award, Steinberg Playwright Award, the Evening Standard Award, the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award, the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the Windham Campbell Award, and a USA Artist Award. He is currently Chair of Playwriting at Yale School of Drama; an ensemble member at Steppenwolf Theatre Chicago; and a member of Teo Castellanos/D-Projects. McCraney is currently working on an original scripted TV series, David Makes Man, for Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Network, produced by Michael B Jordan and Page Fright Productions.
DEREK LEE MCPHATTER is committed to new work at the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality and technology. Derek is a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee and 2020 Resident Playwright with Chicago Dramatists. He has written five musicals for The Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Lyric Unlimited division. Bring the Beat Back is his queer, black, sci-fi, music-theatre passion project, a 2020 O'Neill Semi-finalist, and recently a featured presentation in the 2019 Polyphone Music Festival (Philadelphia), followed by a concert production run with Otherworld Theatre Company. Derek is currently developing NightQueen, an afro-surreal performance suite. Other recent plays include Real Talk with Auntie B, a satire on American ambition in the age of social media. His recent residency at The National Black Theatre (NYC) incubated Serious Adverse Effects, his futuristic play on technologies of healing. Organizations that have presented his work include The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Prop Thtr, Hi-ARTS, JACK, the Djerassi Artists Residency, and The Drama League. Derek is a founding playwright with The Fire This Time Festival and an inaugural playwright in the 48 Hours in Harlem Festival, two Obie-winning programs in NYC. Beyond theater, Derek has co-created digital programming for numerous platforms, such as HIVE, a sci-fi anthology series in development with OTV | Open Television. Derek served as showrunner for the pilot for Hair Story, an experimental digital series with OTV (Open Television), and co-creator of She’s Out of Order, a comedy series that received an Outstanding Guest Actress Award at Los Angeles Webfest 2015. His work has been supported by grants and prizes from the Jerome Foundation, the Chicago Digital Media Production Fund, the Puffin Foundation, the Propeller Fund, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and the United States Embassy in the United Kingdom, to name a few. Derek is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Morehouse College and a Master of Arts in Humanities from New York University. He is originally from Pickerington, Ohio and splits his time between Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.
MATT MINNICINO is a Virginia-born, Manhattan-based playwright, adaptor, actor, director, teacher, and theatre-maker. He has been a resident with SPACE on Ryder Farm, Exquisite Corpse, Sugarglass Theatre at Trinity College in Dublin, the Barn Arts Collective, Letter of Marque, the box collective, and numerous others. He is a Jeffrey Melnick New Playwright Award Nominee, two-time O'Neill New Play Conference semi-finalist, winner of the 2016 Arts & Letters Prize, and member of Pipeline Theatre’s PlayLab, Everday Inferno’s Writer/Director Lab, Joust Theatre’s Writers’ Round Table, and 2018 Great Plains Theatre Conference PlayLab. He has written for Serials@The Flea, Rule of 7x7, and the NYC Fringe, FauxReal, and Shenandoah Fringe Festivals. He has professionally adapted Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen, Gorky, Homer, Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Moliere, and more. His essays on theatre have been published by The Dramatist, Gathering of the Tribes, and HowlRound. In his spare time, he teaches kids about Shakespeare. MFA: Columbia.
DARIA MIYEKO MARINELLI (they/she) is a Japanese-Italian playwright who writes about outcasts and underdogs trying to honor the wildness of their heart, the impossible long-con, and the things we take for fact that are really just cultural mythology. Their plays include Ravenous, A Departure, Beautiful Blessed Child, and This is Not What I Expected When I Imagined a Republic. Daria’s work has been performed at Victory Gardens, Ensemble Theatre Company, La Jolla Playhouse’s WOW Festival, The Flea, and HERE Arts Center, among others. Mx. Marinelli has developed work with SPACE on Ryder Farm, The Playwright’s Realm, Fault Line Theatre, NNPN’s MFA Playwrights Workshop and TYA/USA’s New Visions New Voices at The Kennedy Center, and The New Harmony Project. Accolades include being a Finalist for The O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and The Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist, a Princess Grace Semi-Finalist, and a showcased writer at the Consortium of Asian-American Theaters & Artists. Daria graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Magnum Cum Laude, and with Honors from Brown University and received their MFA in Playwriting as a Michener Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin. While forever a New Yorker at heart, Daria is currently based in Los Angeles.
DAAIMAH MUBASHSHIR is a playwright and theatre-maker. Her work has been commissioned by the Guthrie Theater and 3 Hole Press. Awards include a 2021 PlayCo Residency for Black Women Theatre Makers, 2020-2022 WP Theater Lab Fellowship, 2019-2022 Core Writer Fellowship (Playwrights Center, MN), an 2018 Audrey Residency (New Georges), a MacDowell Fellowship, a Catwalk Institute Residency, a Foundation of Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. She is also a proud alumna of Fire This Time Festival. Her published works include Molasses and A Blue Coat - Kenyon Review Online, The Zero Loop (No Tokens Journal), Come with Me - Solve for X in The Occasional 2, edited by Will Arbery (53rd State Press), and The Immeasurable Want of Light (MacDowell, 3 Hole Press). Selected stage plays include Night of Power, Room Enough (MacDowell, Fire This Time Festival, Clubbed Thumb, Pride Plays, Playwrights Center), The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente and Emily Black is A Total Gift (New Georges). Daaimah is currently on faculty at Bard College and has also been a guest speaker at Yale School of Drama, Williams College, Skidmore College, and Kennesaw State University. She is the Artistic Director of {EDAP} which produces moving image work, text and performance to give audiences a kinetic experience of black bodies freeing themselves from the bondage of our past.
MASHUQ MUSHTAQ DEENis an award-winning resident playwright at New Dramatists, a core writer at the Playwrights Center, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Draw The Circle (productions: PlayMakers Rep, Mosaic Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre; published: Dramatists Play Service). His other full-length plays include Flood (covid-canceled production at Kansas City Rep), The Empty Place (NYU/New Dramatists Joint Commission), The Betterment Society (upcoming publication), The Shaking Earth (covid-postponed production, National Queer Theater), and Tank & Horse (world premiere at the Berkshire Fringe Festival).
JONATHAN NORTON Jonathan’s work has been produced or developed by Actors Theatre of Louisville/Humana Festival, Dallas Theater Center, PlayPenn, InterAct Theatre Company, Pyramid Theatre Company, Black and Latino Playwrights Conference, Bishop Arts Theatre Center, African American Repertory Theatre, Soul Rep Theatre, Kitchen Dog Theater, Undermain Theatre, South Dallas Cultural Center, the National Performance Network, and the National New Play Network. Jonathan’s play Mississippi Goddamn was a Finalist for the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award and won the 2016 M. Elizabeth Osborn Award given by the American Theatre Critics Association. Other awards include: Artistic Innovations Grant from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, SDCC Diaspora Performing Arts Commission, the TACA Family New Works Fund and the TACA Bowdon Family Foundation Artist Residency Fund, and Jubilee Theatre's 2019 Eastman Visionary Award. Jonathan is the Playwright in Residence at the Dallas Theater Center.
AZURE D. OSBORNE LEE (he/they) is a multi-award-winning Black queer theatre maker from south of the Mason-Dixon Line. He holds an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice (2011) from Royal Central School of Speech & Drama as well as an MA in Women’s & Gender Studies (2008) and a BA in English & Spanish from The University of Texas at Austin (2005). Recipient of Waterwell New Works Lab’s 2021 Commission, Kilroys List 2020 playwright, recipient of Parity Productions’ 2018 Annual Commission, Winner of Downtown Urban Arts Festival’s 2018 Best Play Award, and the 2015 Mario Fratti-Fred Newman Political Play Contest. Azure’s full-length play “Crooked Parts” was published in The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays. His full-length play “Mirrors” received its world premiere, produced by Parity Productions, at Next Door at New York Theatre Workshop February 29-March 22, 2020. Unfortunately, this production closed early on March 12, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Azure is the founder of Roots and River Productions, and was a member of the inaugural Trans Theater Lab cohort. Azure’s work has been produced and/or developed by Trans Lab @ The Public and WP, Parity Productions, PRIDE Plays, The Tank, The Flea Theater, BAX|Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BAM, JACK, Rising Circle Theater Collective, The Fire This Time Festival, Horse Trade Theater Group, The Castillo Theatre, The New Ohio Theatre, National Black Theatre, Freedom Train Productions, Downtown Urban Arts Festival, Lambda Literary Foundation, The Helix Queer Performance Network, and regionally. Finalist for Theatre Viscera’s Queer Playwright’s Contest, VanguardRep’s 2019 Summer Production, BAX|Brooklyn Arts Exchange’s 2018 Artist in Residence, National Black Theatre’s I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency, and Soho Rep’s Writer/Director Lab; Semi-finalist for the 2019 Burman New Play Award, Ars Nova’s Play Group and New York Theatre Workshop’s Emerging Artists Fellowship. Member: Dramatists Guild.
SYLVAN OSWALD is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Philadelphia who creates plays, texts, publications, and video. His work uses metatheatricality and formal irreverence to explore the ways we construct our identities. Recent projects include the theatrical essay Trainers (Gate Theatre, London) and the performance text High Winds, based on the book of the same name he co-authored with graphic designer Jessica Fleischmann, now out from X Artists' Books. Sylvan’s lo-fi semi-improvised web series Outtakes starring Becca Blackwell and Zuzanna Szadkowski is hosted at weareopentv.com. His plays and collaborations include A Kind of Weather (Diversionary Theatre, San Diego), Sun Ra (Joe’s Pub, Jerome Travel and Study Grant, Soho Rep Writer-Director Lab), Profanity (Undermain Theater, Dallas; Soho Rep Dorothy Strelsin Fellowship), Nightlands (New Georges), Pony (About Face Theater, Chicago), and Vendetta Chrome (Clubbed Thumb). Honors include a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rosati Fellowship from Duke University Libraries, the Thom Thomas award from The Dramatists Guild, a Jerome Fellowship, and residencies at Sundance/Ucross, Macdowell Colony, and Yaddo. Sylvan is an associate professor and head of playwriting at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film & Television, where, in Spring 2020, he taught a course called “Theater of Quarantine.” He is a member of CTG's Writers' Workshop, an affiliated artist at Clubbed Thumb and an alum of New Dramatists.
ROBERT O’HARA has received the NAACP Best Play and Best Director Award, the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, two Obie Awards, and the Herb Alpert Award. He directed the world premieres of Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, Nikkole Salter and Dania Guiria’s In the Continuum, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays (Part 2), Colman Domingo’s Wild with Happy, Kirsten Childs’ Bella: An American Tall Tale, as well as his own plays, Mankind, Bootycandy, and Insurrection: Holding History. His plays Zombie: The American and Barbecue world premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre and The Public Theater, respectively. His recent directing projects include Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun at Williamstown Theatre Festival, Aziza Barnes’ BLKS at MCC, Inda Craig-Galván’s Black Super Hero Magic Mama at the Geffen Playhouse, the Universes’ UNISON, inspired by the poetry of August Wilson at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Shakespeare’s Macbeth at Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
LILY PADILLA makes plays about sex, intersectional communities and what it means to heal in a violent world. Their play How to Defend Yourself won the 2019 Yale Drama Series Prize and is a 2018-19 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Finalist. Lily’s work has been developed with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Victory Gardens Theater, INTAR Theatre and San Diego Repertory Theatre. They facilitate playwriting workshops with the La Jolla Playhouse/TCG Veterans & Theatre Institute and teach playwriting and devised theatre at the University of San Diego and the University of California, San Diego. M.F.A., UC San Diego, B.F.A., New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Padilla is currently commissioned to make new plays with the National New Play Network, Colt Coeur, and South Coast Repertory. They are also a director, actor and community builder who looks at rehearsal as a laboratory for how we might be together.
MONICA PALACIOS is the creator of solo shows, plays, screenplays, short stories, stand-up comedy, poems, featuring the Latinx LGBTQ experience. Monica is the winner of the 2021 inaugural Nancy Dean Playwriting Award sponsored by Open Meadows Foundation. Monica was selected for the Lucille Geier Lakes Writer-in-Residence at Smith College 2019. Palacios was granted The McKenna Guest Artist Award 2019 during her fall residency at Holyoke Community College. National and international scholars have critically engaged her work in academic journals, books, dissertations and conference panels. She is featured in the new queer documentary STAND UP, STAND OUT: The Making Of A Comedy Movement by David Pavlosky, about the first gay comedy club in the nation 1980s San Francisco www.standupstandoutfilm.com. Monica was selected as the playwriting faculty for the 2021 Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, a program of the national organization Lambda Literary. Palacios has received numerous awards for her positive contributions to the Latinx LGBTQ population, most recently from the City of Los Angeles as a Latinx LGBTQ Trailblazer. Monica was selected for a Postdoctoral Rockefeller Fellowship from University of California Santa Barbara allowing her to write, direct and produce her play Sweet Peace. Current solo performances and plays being presented: I'm Still Here, Say Their Names, San Francisco Mi Amor!, BROWNER QUEERER LOUDER PROUDER and I Kissed Chavela Vargas. Recent publications include: Practicing Transgressions by Third Woman Press 2021; The Jota Anthology by Korima Press 2021; Scenes For Latinx Actors: Voices of The New American Theatre by Smith and Kraus Publishers 2018; Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando by Damaged Goods Press 2018; Game Changers: Lesbians You Should Know About by Robin Lowey Press 2017—Winner of Next Generation Indie Book Award 2018, and IMANIMAN: Poets Writing In The Anzaldúan Borderlands by Aunt Lute Press 2016
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.
KYOUNG H. PARK was born in Santiago, Chile and is the first Korean playwright from Latin America to be produced and published in the United States. He is author of SEX AND HUNGER, DISORIENTED, WALKABOUT YEOLHA, TALA, PILLOWTALK and many short plays including MINA, which is published in "Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas" by Duke University Press. Kyoung has worked internationally in Chile, Korea, England, India, Brazil, and is recipient of an Edward Albee playwriting fellowship, Theater of the Oppressed International Exchange Fellowship, Target Margin Theater's Institute for Collaborative Theater-Making Fellowship, Field Leadership Fund Fellowship, Creative Mellon Fellowship, grants from the Princess Grace Foundation (via Theatre C), TCG Global Connections--On the Road program, Arvon Foundation, GK Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, and was named a 2010-UNESCO Aschberg Laureate. Kyoung currently writes and directs his own work as Artistic Director of Kyoung's Pacific Beat, a peacemaking theater company.
DARCY PARKER BRUCE is a playwright and educator from New Haven, CT, and a graduate of the MFA Playwriting program at Smith College. In the summer they join the Sewanee Writers’ Conference as part of their staff. Darcy was the recipient of a 2017 Tennessee Williams Scholarship through the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and was granted ATHE's 2018 Judith Royer Award For Excellence in Theater for their play SOLDIER POET. They are currently working on several projects including commissions from Chester Theatre Company and Acadiana Repertory Theater, and a cycle of plays investigating the relationship between small towns, queers, and American Glory. Their play Always Plenty of Light at the Starlight All Night Diner can now be purchased through Broadway Play Publishing.
MING PEIFFER is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter from Columbus, Ohio and the first Asian woman to be nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Best Play in its history. Her play USUAL GIRLS (3 Drama Desk Nominations including Outstanding Play, John Gassner Award Nomination, Hull Warriner Award Finalist, Relentless Award Honorable Mention, New York Times Critic’s Pick) enjoyed a double-extended, sold out run at Roundabout Underground in NYC in 2018. Her work has been developed and/or presented by Roundabout Theatre Company, New York Theatre Workshop, The New Group, The Kennedy Center, Ensemble Studio Theater, HERE Arts Center, The Flea, The Wild Project, New Ohio, Soho Playhouse, The Gene Frankel Theater, FringeNYC, among others. Awards and fellowships include: 2017 Kilroy's List, NYTW 2050 Fellowship, Youngblood Member, The Kennedy Center's Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award Recipient, The Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center NPC Finalist, Princess Grace Award Semi-Finalist, Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award Finalist. Ming 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. Ming is currently under commission at Roundabout Theatre Company and Annapurna Theatricals. In Television and Film Ming has developed projects with F/X, Amazon, AMC, and has staffed at Netflix and Hulu.
CHRISTOPHER OSCAR PEÑA is a story-teller originally from California, now residing in New York and LA. In 2019 he co-directed the world premiere of Sean Daniels adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “lost novel” The Haunted Life at Merrimack Rep. The production marked the first time the Kerouac Estate had ever sanctioned an official theatrical adaptation of Kerouac’s work. Most recently, as a playwright, the Clarence Brown Theatre commissioned and produced the world premiere of his play The Strangers. In New York, the Flea Theatre produced the world premiere of his play a cautionary tail. His work has been developed by Playwrights Horizons, the Goodman Theater, Public Theater, Two River Theater, INTAR, Ontological Hysteric Incubator, Playwrights Realm, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Old Vic, Orchard Project, Naked Angels, and New York Theatre Workshop, among many others. This upcoming season, his play how to make an American Son will have its world premiere in a co-production between Arizona Theatre Company and Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre in New York. A two-time Sundance Institute Theater Fellow, he has also held fellowships with the Lark Play Development Center, was a recipient of the Latino Playwrights Award, an Emerging Artist Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow, and was a part of the US/UK Exchange (Old Vic New Voices). Recently named an Artistic Associate at Arizona Theatre Company, he’s a proud member of New Dramatists, was named one of “The 1st Annual Future Broadway Power List” by Backstage, and has been published by No Passport Press and Smith and Krauss. This year, with visionary director James Darrah and Pulitzer Prize winning composer Ellen Reid, he created and showran the Boston Lyric Opera's first ever digital opera series Desert In, by bringing together some of the countries best writers, composers and directors, to premiere in 2021. He is continuing his partnership with Darrah by creating a piece for the Los Angeles Chamber Opera this year. In television, he was a writer on the Golden Globe nominated debut season of the CW show Jane the Virgin, and the critically acclaimed HBO show Insecure (also recurred on screen as the character Gary), as well as the Starz show Sweetbitter, and Motherland: Fort Salem on Freeform. He is currently developing an original series for Netflix. B.A. UC Santa Barbara / M.F.A. NYU-Tisch School of the Arts
ELIANA PIPES is a playwright and actor. She’s the 2019 recipient of the Leah Ryan Fund Prize for Emerging Women Writers. She received a BA in English from Columbia University, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Playwriting from Boston University. Eliana Pipes is a playwright, filmmaker, and Angelino. She’s the recipient of the Academy Gold Fellowship for Women, the Leah Ryan Fund Prize for Emerging Women Writers, the National Latinx Playwriting Award, and a member of the 20/21 Dramatist Guild Foundation Fellowship cohort. Her work has been developed or presented at the Playwright’s Realm Scratchpad Series, NNPN/Kennedy Center MFA Playwright’s Workshop, Ars Nova ANT Fest, San Diego Rep New Latinx Plays Festival, Two River Theater Crossing Borders Festival, Kitchen Dog Theater New Works Festival, The Fire This Time Festival, and the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Festival. She’s the recipient of the KCACTF Ken Ludwig Scholarship, the WAVE Grant through Wavelength Productions, and a two-time Finalist for the O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference. She received a BA in English from Columbia University, and has just completed the coursework on an MFA in Playwriting from Boston University. More at www.elianapipes.com.
CHANA PORTER, writes the NY Times, “uses incongruity and exaggeration to suggest some midnight-dark truths about human life and endeavor.” She is an emerging playwright, speculative novelist, and education activist. Their plays have been developed or produced at New Georges, Playwrights Horizons, The Catastrophic Theatre, La MaMa, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, Cherry Lane, The Invisible Dog, & Movement Research. Houston Press writes “Porter’s type of risky storytelling is, well…. like a lion’s roar in an all too often timid jungle.” She is a MacDowell Fellow, a New Georges Audrey Resident, a Target Margin Artist-in-Residence, and the recipient of Honorable Mention for the Relentless Prize. She is currently writer-in-residence at The Catastrophic Theatre in Houston. Chana is the co-founder of the Octavia Project, a free summer writing and STEM program for Brooklyn teenage girls and non-binary youth. She has taught her embodied creativity course Writing from the Body at University of Houston, Fordham University, Hampshire College, Goddard College, Weber State, and with Sarah Lawrence’s Global Classroom. Their debut novel, The Seep, out from Soho Press and Brilliance Audio, with starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Library Journal, and Foreword Reviews. The Seep is an ABA Indie Next Pick for February 2020. Chana is a queer Jewish genderfluid alien grateful to be embodied in human form. Pronouns: She/They.
LARRY POWELL is a faculty member at the USC School of Dramatic Arts, teaching in the MFA Acting program. He is a writer, actor, director and producer born and raised in South Central L.A. As an actor, he is a two-time Ovation Award nominee, three-time NAACP Theatre Award nominee, San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Award nominee, two-time LA Drama Critics Circle Award winner, as well as an Audelco and Audie Award nominee. He is also a published playwright and professional screenwriter. He most recently finished as screenwriter on an upcoming feature film which wrapped in NYC spring 2019. He has three plays that will receive world premieres over the next two years. He is a core playwright at the Lark Play Development Center. Powell is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama and the Founder/Creative Director of The Powell Academy of the Performing Arts, an arts organization providing high-performance training and resources to historically marginalized artists on the rise in the mainstream entertainment industry.
C. QUINTANA, or CQ (pronouns: she/her, any) is a queer writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. There is "other" and "in-between" in all of us; CQ tells stories that mine the misconception of dissimilarity and proclaim, "You are not alone." Her plays and musicals have been developed and produced with companies including Barrington Stage Company, Southern Rep, INTAR, Lark Play Development Center, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Astoria Performing Arts Center, and more. Her play Scissoring is published and available for licensing via Dramatists Play Service and a monologue from AZUL, which was featured on the 2017 Kilroys List and had its world premiere at Southern Rep as part of the 2019 Tennessee Williams/Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, is published in The Kilroys List: Volume 2. For more, visit NPX. CQ's poetry, fiction, and lyric nonfiction is published or forthcoming in Jacar, Santa Clara Review, Wildness Journal, OnCuba, Nimrod Journal, Foglifter, great weather for MEDIA, and beyond. She is the author of the poetry chapbook The Heart Wants (Finishing Line Press), and her poem "She-lium" was featured on Radiolab's "Elements" episode in collaboration with Emotive Fruition. CQ's half-hour dramedy Career Gay was a top ten featured pilot on the inaugural Out in Hollywood list. Her hour-long dystopian drama pilot, Invisible Lily, appeared on the WeForShe "Ones to Watch" List, and she served as Staff Writer on ABC's 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 Kennedy Center, Audible, The Civilians, Palo Alto Playhouse, EST/Alfred P. Sloan Project, Peppercorn Theatre Company, and more. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.
MANSA RA is a Memphis, Tennessee native and proud Morehouse Man. Trained at Yale School of Drama, his plays merge the political with the poetic. For his professional debut, he 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 Roundabout Theatre Company. This was followed by regional productions in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago, Des Moines to Houston, and more. Ra currently writes for NBC’s hit medical drama “New Amsterdam.” In fall 2021, ...what the end will be is to be presented at Roundabout Theatre Company.
ERIC REYES LOO is a playwright and TV writer based in his hometown, Los Angeles. He has produced and developed work with local theatres such as Pacific Resident Theatre, Rogue Machine, The Blank, Moving Arts and Chalk Rep and other places around the country like The Inkwell, Lark Play Development Center, Manhattan Theatre Source, George Street Playhouse and Rattlestick. He's an alumnus of the Playwrights Union and is the Artistic Producing Director of Chalk Repertory Theatre where he also oversees the company's new play development initiatives. Eric currently is in East West Players writers group, where he developed two new plays, REPLACED, and THE SHIFT, which is a companion piece to his 2018 play DEATH AND COCKROACHES. Eric has participated in Moving Arts' MADLab Development series twice, writing his play, LIKE A BOY, in 2019. In 2015, he developed THIS IS ONLY A TEST (upcoming production by Broken Nose in Chicago), about active shooter drills through MADLab. His play, DEATH AND COCKROACHES, was produced by Chalk Repertory Theatre in LA in November 2018. In addition, Eric has an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, which he attended on a full-scholarship and was awarded a scholarship from the National Hispanic Coalition for the Arts. He has been a lecturer in playwriting, screenwriting and TV writing at San Diego State University and wrote for two years on the teen melodrama GUIDANCE from Awesomeness TV and Verizon's Go90. Seasons Two and Three can be found on Hulu. Most recently, Eric was an Executive Story Editor on the series, A.J. AND THE QUEEN, currently on Netflix.
ANYA RICHKIND: A Brooklyn-based playwright, Anya has been honored as a winner of Brooklyn College's 2020-2021 Creative Writing Award and Brooklyn College's Himan Brown Award for Creative Writing, a finalist in the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, the Leah Ryan's Fund for Emerging Women Writers, and the Cutting Ball Theater's Variety Pack Series, and as a semi-finalist in the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the Seven Devils' Playwrights Conference. Anya's work has been produced with Brooklyn College, Corkscrew Theater Festival, The Barrow Group Theatre, Yale College, The New School for Drama, The American Conservatory Theater's Young Conservatory, Marin Country Day School and The Tank. Anya graduated with a BA from Yale University, where she studied playwriting, queer history and Eastern European culture. Anya's professors have included Sarah Ruhl, Donald Margulies, Deb Margolin, Liz Duffy Adams, Adam Gwon and Stefanie Zavadrec. Anya is currently pursuing an MFA in playwriting at Brooklyn College (expected May 2022), studying with Tina Satter and Anne Washburn, supported by the Capote Foundation scholarship.
ANDREW RINCÓN is a Queer Colombian-American playwright based in NYC. His plays have been developed with Rising Circle Theatre Collective, INTAR, Amios, the Austin Latino New Play Festival, The Amoralists Theatre Company, Pork Filled Productions (Seattle), Out Front Productions (Atlanta), and The 24 Hour Plays. He was one of six playwrights in Wright Club, The Amoralist's Theatre Company's yearlong playwright development program (15-16) He was a member of INKtank Lab for Playwrights of Color (17) and the 2017 Fornés Playwriting Workshop in Chicago. He is winner of the 2018 Chesley/Bumbalo Grant for writers of Gay and Lesbian Theatre. He is a company member of Unit 52 at INTAR, the NYC Latinx Playwrights Circle, and a Dramatist Guild Foundation Fellow (19-20). Plays include You Got That Same Kind of Lonely, and That Rhythm in the Blood. He is currently working on a new play entitled I’ll meet you outside the airport, ok?, which follows a Colombian American family producing a local access telenovela in Miami grappling with their idea of the “American Dream.” His queer fantasia play I Wanna Fuck like Romeo and Juliet is the winner of New Light Theatre Project's "New Light New Voices Award" (19) and was to receive its New York stage premiere in their 19/20 season in May of 2020. The play was originally written for an audio format and can be heard for free on “The Parsnip Ship,” season 3, episode 4.
HARRISON DAVID RIVERS is the winner of the 2018 Relentless Award for his play the bandaged place (New York Stage & Film). His produced plays include: When Last We Flew (GLAAD Media Award, NYFringe Excellence in Playwriting Award, NYFringe, Diversionary Theatre, TheatreLAB, Real Live Theatre), Sweet (AUDELCO nomination for Best Play, National Black Theatre), And She Would Stand Like This (20% Theatre Company, The Movement Theatre Company), Where Storms Are Born (Berkshire Theatre Award nomination for Best New Play, Edgerton Foundation New Play Award, Williamstown Theatre Festival), A Crack in the Sky (History Theatre), Five Points (MN Theatre Award for Exceptional New Work, Lavender Magazine citation for Outstanding New Playwriting, BroadwayWorld Minneapolis Award for Best New Work, Inclusion in MinnPost’s year-end “Best” List, Theatre Latte Da) This Bitter Earth (MN Theatre Award for Exceptional New Work, Lavender Magazine citation for Outstanding New Playwriting, Joseph Jefferson Award nomination for Best Production, New Conservatory Theatre Center, Penumbra, About Face), To Let Go and Fall (Theatre Latte Da) and Broadbend, Arkansas (Transport Group/Public Theater). Harrison was named a Runner-up for the 2018 Artist of the Year by the Star Tribune and a 2017 Artist of the Year by City Pages. He has received McKnight and Many Voices Jerome Fellowships, a Van Lier Fellowship, an Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship and residencies with the Bogliasco Foundation, the Siena Art Institute, the Hermitage and Duke University. Harrison was the 2016 Playwright-in-Residence at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Harrison is an alum of the Public Theater's Emerging Writers' Group, Interstate 73, NAMT and The Lincoln Center Directors' Lab. He is a NYTW Usual Suspect and a member of the Playwright Center's Board of Directors. BA: Kenyon College. MFA: Columbia School of the Arts.
JAN ROSENBERG is a New York based playwright. Jan is a 3x semi-finalist for the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference (How To Destroy An American Girl Doll, What's Wrong With You, A Little Piece Of You), and a one time finalist (Gusher!). Former playwright in residence at Stella Adler Studio, where What's Wrong With You received a production. Jan was commissioned to write Never Have I Ever by the Farm Theater and was performed at colleges and considered by the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Jan's plays have been presented in readings and workshops with the Seattle Rep, The Lark, Cherry Lane Theater, Barefoot Theater Company, Vertigo Theater, LAByrinth Theater, ESPA*Drills at Primary Stages, Wide Eyed Productions, NY Madness, 1 Minute Play Festival, Radish Fiction, the Valdez Theater Conference, New Works Festival, The Farm Theater, and various colleges and high schools. Jan is an alum of LAByrinth Theater’s Summer Intensive Ensemble and is a member of the Playwright/Directors Unit at The Actor's Studio. B.A from Eugene Lang College. [Jan/Jan's]
HALEH ROSHAN is an Iranian-American writer with Charcot-Marie Tooth disease. Her work fuses leftist politics with intercultural narratives to challenge global capitalist power structures and trouble conceptions of individual identity and ability. Plays include A PLAY TITLED AFTER THE COLLECTIVE NOUN FOR FEMALE-IDENTIFYING 20-SOMETHINGS LIVING IN NYC IN THE 2010S, about young leftist women during the 2016 Democratic Primaries (2019 Corkscrew Festival); FREE FREE FREE FREE (2018 O'Neill NPC Finalist; Exponential Festival), chronicling the successes and failures of the Diggers, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Black Panthers in 1967; THE WOMAN QUESTION, adapted from the Evin-prison memoir of a woman in 1980s Iran; THE HOUSEGUEST, freely adapted from a play by Mohsen Yalfani (Oye! Avant Garde); and REVERENCE, a retelling of the founding years of the Joffrey Ballet examining the relationship between art and money (Tom Kirdahy Productions). Pilots include BELLWETHER (2016 Austin Film Festival Second-Round Semi-Finalist) and THE LEGITIMATE, about women in the theater in the 1930s and '40s (Screen Craft Quarter Finalist). Her fiction has appeared in online literary journals and been read at Mellow Pages, KGB, Pacific Standard, and others. MA: NYU Gallatin. @halehroshan / halehroshan.com
SOPHIE SAGAN-GUTHERZ is a NYC/Boston based playwright, actor and singer. They are currently part of Speakers Corner Writers Group (Gingold Theatrical) and are a semi-finalist for the R&D Group (The Civilians, 2020). Full-length plays include Marked Green at Birth, Marked Female at Birth (The Jam, New Georges, 2020; Emerging Writers Group Finalist, The Public, 2020; PlaySpace Semi-Finalist, Pipeline, 2020). Their work has developed with Pride Plays, the 24 Hour Play Festival, Fresh Ground Pepper, The Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Tribe and Am I Write Ladies?. BFA: NYU Tisch in Drama with an Honors Thesis in Theatre Studies.
AENEAS SAGAR HEMPHILL (he/him) is an Indian-American playwright and screenwriter based in NYC and DC. Weaving through genres, his work builds new worlds to illuminate our own, using passion, pathos, and humor to investigate the ghosts that haunt our lives and communities. He is currently a 2020-2021 Speakers’ Corner Fellow at Gingold Theatrical Group. He was a 2019 Resident Artist with Monson Arts Center and 2017-2018 Playlab Fellow at Pipeline Theatre, as well as semi-finalist for the 2019 Princess Grace Award, semi-finalist for the 2019 Mabou Mines Resident Artist Program, and finalist for the 2017 Many Voices Fellowship. His plays include: Black Hollow (Argo Collective, Dreamscape Theatre), The Troll King (Pipeline), Childhood Songs (Monson Arts), The Republic of Janet & Arthur (Amios), The Red Balloon (Noor Theatre), A Stitch Here or There (DarkHorse Dramatists, Slingshot Theatre), A Horse and a Housecat (Slingshot Theatre). MFA Playwriting, Columbia University.
OMER ABBAS SALEM is a Chicago actor and writer. As an actor, his Chicago credits include Linda, Earthquakes in London, Light Falls (Steep Theatre), My Dear Hussein, INVASION! (Silk Road Rising), Even Longer and Further Away (The New Colony), Pinocchio (The House), Princess Mary (Bailiwick Chicago), and Washer/Dryer (Rasaka Theatre). Regional: A Christmas Carol and You Across From Me (Actors Theatre of Louisville). Off Broadway: Eddie and Dave (The Atlantic Theater). His writing has been produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville, Jackalope Theater, The New Colony, National Queer Theater, and Steppenwolf Theatre. His play Mosque4Mosque has under gone development through The Habibis and National Queer Theater and is Steppenwolf Theatre's SCOUT Program development for 2020/2021. His play Being Julia Roberts is part of Jackalope Theatre's New Frontier Series 2020/2021. The Secretaries is a semi-finalist in Definition Theatre's Amplify Commission 2020/2021. He is a proud Core Ensemble Member of The New Colony a founding member of MENASA MidWest and was an Actors Theatre of Louisville apprentice 17/18. He is represented by DDO Chicago. www.omerabbassalem.com
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 showrunner of the upcoming 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 Theatre Center, Victory Gardens Theatre, Theatreworks, Primary Stages and 2nd Stage in NYC, Denver Theatre Center, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Goodman Theater, Steppenwolf Theater, 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 Theatre Company) as well as the founder of ALTA (Alliance of Latino Theatre Artists). She is currently under commission with South Coast Repertory and Two River Theatre.
MARCUS SCOTT is a playwright, musical theater writer, librettist, journalist, critic and teaching artist. Full-length works include "Fidelio" (Libretto; Heartbeat Opera at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 2018; called "poignant" by NY Times and "vital" by The New Yorker), "Tumbleweed" (Finalist for the 2017 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, 2017/2018 Humanitas Play LA Workshop and the 2017 Festival of New American Plays at Austin Playhouse; semi-finalist for the 2017/2018 New Dramatists Princess Grace Fellowship Award), "Sibling Rivalries" (long-listed for the 2020 Theatre503 International Playwriting Award; finalist for ATHE’s 2021 Judith Royer Excellence in Playwriting Award, the 2021 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference; semifinalist for 2021 Blue Ink Playwriting Award, the Landing Theatre Company’s 2020 New American Voices Playwriting Festival and the 2020 Campfire Theatre Festival), and "Cherry Bomb" (recipient of the 2017 Drama League First Stage Artist-In-Residence; 2017 Finalist for the Yale Institute for Music Theatre). His work has been developed, presented and/or produced by Joe's Pub, Feinstein's/54 Below, Abingdon Theatre Company, Astoria Performing Arts Center, Weathervane Theatre (Out of the Box Theatrics), Dixon Place, National Black Theatre (KSA series), Playwright’s Playground at Classical Theatre of Harlem, Space on Ryder Farm, Cherry Lane Theater (DUAF), Theater 80 St. Marks (DUAF), Across A Crowded Room - Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library (NYPL), Prospect Theater Company, NY Theatre Barn, CoLAB Arts, Symphony Space, NYC LGBT Center, Secret Theatre, New Circle Theatre Company, MicroTheater Miami, among others. Residencies and retreats: The Center at West Park Virtual Performance Residency (2020-2021), Gingold Theatre Group Speaker's Corner Writer (2020-2021), Liberation Theatre Company's Playwriting Residency Fellowship (2018), Athena Theatre’s Athena Writes Playwriting Fellowship (2018), the inaugural LIT Council at the Tank (2018-2019), Fresh Ground Pepper Artist-In-Residence BRB Retreat (2017), One Co. Writers' Residency at Little Farm (2017) and Goodspeed Opera House Retreat (2013). He was also the 2016-17 Musical Theatre Fellow at Playwrights Horizons and the 2017-2018 co-moderator of Musical Theatre Factory's POC Roundtable. Scott is a four-time top finalist for the R&D Group at The Civilians, a two-time National Black Theatre I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency finalist and a 2019 finalist for the Bushwick Starr's Starr Reading Series. His articles appeared in TimeOut New York, American Theatre Magazine, Playbill, Elle, Out, Essence, among others. BFA: State University College at Buffalo, MFA: NYU Tisch.
JORDAN SEAVEY’s plays include Homos, or Everyone in America (New York Times Critic’s Pick; named one of New York Magazine’s 10 Best Theater Events of 2016 and The Advocate’s Top 10 New York Theater of 2016), November 4th 2008, Wight, The Funny Pain, The Truth Will Out, Children at Play, 6969 and This is a Newspaper. Since 2003 he’s co-created more than fifteen new plays with theater company CollaborationTown. These include Candy (a commission from LCT3 / Lincoln Center), the all-ages puppet musical Riddle of the Trilobites (as residents of New Victory Theater's LabWorks), Family Play (1979 to Present) (named one of The Advocate’s 10 Best LGBT Plays of 2014), and The Momentum (2012 GLAAD National Media Award nomination). He is a Usual Suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, and an alum of The Public Theater's Emerging Writer’s Group and the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab. His work has been developed with Lincoln Center Theater, New York Theater Workshop, The Public Theater, Labyrinth Theater Company, Roundabout Theater Company, The Old Vic (London), Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, 59E59 Theaters, The Flea Theater, The New Ohio Theater, Lark Play Development Center, SPACE at Ryder Farm, The Orchard Project, The MacDowell Colony, Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
MICHAEL SHAYAN is an Iranian-American Jewish playwright and performer based in NY. He was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Playwriting. He has recently developed and presented work at New York Stage & Film, La MaMa, The Lark, Project Y and Dixon Place. He is currently developing a theatrical project with Susanne Bartsch. BA: Harvard College. MFA: Playwriting, Brooklyn College, under Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. Recipient of the Himan Brown Playwriting Award. Finalist: New Dramatists. Michael was also a member and performer at The Magic Castle in Hollywood.
ANDREW SIANEZ DE LA O is a Boston based Mexican-American playwright from El Paso, Texas. Andrew is a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, supported by the Stanford Calderwood Fund for New American Plays, at the Huntington Theatre Company, Boston Massachusetts. Additionally, he is a Scratchpad Playwright with The Playwrights Realm (NYC), the 2019 Gish Jen Fellow with the Writers’ Room of Boston, and a scriptwriter for the Latinx Children's Fiction podcast "Timestorm." In 2019 he was a PlayLab Writer with Pipeline Theatre Company (NYC) and, in 2018, he was a part of the first cohort of playwrights in the National Young Playwrights in Residence program with Echo Theater Company (LA) and a Playwright Fellow with Company One (Boston). He graduated from Emerson College with a BFA in Theatre and Performance and was awarded the college’s Betsy Carpenter Playwriting Award for his play “Sangre Mía.” His collection of short stories, “Lo Siento Miguel,” was published by Wilde Press in 2017. His prose has appeared in fiction magazines such as The Grief Diaries, Stork Literary Magazine, and Concrete Literary Magazine.
JEN SILVERMAN is a New York-based writer. Her plays include Witch (Writers Theatre, The Geffen Playhouse in LA); Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties… (Woolly Mammoth, Southwark Playhouse in London, MCC); The Roommate (Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Steppenwolf directed by Phylicia Rashad, Long Wharf, South Coast Repertory, Theater Biel/Solthurn in Switzerland, Salón Teatro in Spain, etc); and The Moors (The Playwrights Realm, Yale Repertory Theatre, Seymour Center in Sydney, Red Stitch in Melbourne). Jen is a member of New Dramatists, and an affiliated artist with The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. She’s a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow, a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Helen Merrill Award, an LMCC Fellowship, and the Yale Drama Series Award. She was the 2016–2017 Playwrights of New York (PoNY) Fellow at the Lark. Jen is the author of The Island Dwellers, a collection of interlinked stories published by Random House and longlisted for the 2019 PEN America Literary Awards. Her debut novel We Play Ourselves was recently selected by O Magazine as an “LGBTQ Book That Will Change the Literary Landscape.” Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, The Baffler, and LitHub among others. Jen also writes for TV and film (Tales of the City on Netflix, original work in development with FX, A24, Netflix, Ardman Animations and Annapurna). Education: Brown, Iowa Playwrights Workshop, Juilliard.
PHILLIP CHRISTIAN SMITH is a 2020-2021 Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow, Winter Playwrights Retreat, Blue Ink Playwriting Award Semi-Finalist, Finalist for The Dramatists Guild Fellowship and New Dramatists, Finalist and Semi-finalist PlayPenn, Two time Semi-finalist for The O’Neill (NPC), and runner- up in The Theatre of Risk Modern Tragedy writing competition for his play The Chechens, which also won Theatre Conspiracy’s playwriting award, and will be produced in a future season. He has been a semi-finalist for Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries (ASC), finalist for Trustus, Playwright in Residence Exquisite Corpse and founding member of The Playwriting Collective. 2021 Playwright in Residence: Quicksilver Theatre’s Playwrights of Color Summit. His work has been supported by Primary Stages (Cherry Lane) ESPA, Fresh Ground Pepper, the 53rd Street New York Public Library, and Forge. MFA Yale School of Drama, BFA University of New Mexico.
AURIN SQUIRE is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and reporter. He is a recipient of the 2014 Lecomte du Nouy Prize from Lincoln Center and the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwright Fellowship at The Juilliard School. In 2013 his drama Freefalling was produced at Barrington Stage Company and won the 2013 Fiat Lux Award from the Catholic Church’s Theatre Conference. In 2014 Squire won the grand prize in the InspiraTO Theatre’s International Play Festival in Toronto for Freefalling. In 2014-2015, he had fellowships at The Dramatists Guild of America, National Black Theatre, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Squire is the winner of the Act One Writing Contest at Lincoln Center Theatre. His dark comedy To Whom It May Concern won New York LGBT theatre awards for best play, best playwright, and best actor before being optioned and remounted off-broadway to critical acclaim at the ArcLight Theatre. Squire also wrote Dreams of Freedom, the multimedia installation video about Jewish immigrants in the 20th century for the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Dreams won 3 national museum awards and is in the permanent exhibit at NMAJH. His most recent play, Fire Season, premiered at the Seattle Public Theater in January 2019.
RY SZELONG (he/him/his) is a writer/performer/director from the Bay Area, California & currently based in NYC. He was a member of Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writers Group, and was previously a Fellow with University Settlement's Performance Project and LAMBDA Literary's Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. As a performer, he's worked with companies like Dixon Place, JACK, Abrons Arts Center, HERE Arts Center, Pan Pan Theatre at Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, Café LaMaMa Live, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Gym at Judson, The Tank, and The Parsnip Ship at The Actors Fund Arts Center. NYU: Tisch PHTS.
RUTH TANG writes performance texts & poetry & makes weird internet experiments out of Brooklyn, NY. They are a current member of the New Georges Jam, the Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers' Group, and a NYTW 2050 Fellow. Their past work includes FUTURE WIFE: Party in A Google Sheet (Corkscrew Festival 4.0), Bad Chinese (Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Festival, dir. Peter Kuo, 2018), and Building A Character (Wild Rice Singapore, dir. Mei Ann Teo, 2018). MFA: The New School for Drama.
NELLE TANKUS is a white Jewish & Romani trans woman playwright and theater artist. Her/their full-length work has been seen in Seattle at ACT Theatre (Gemini Season, dir. HATLO), 12th Avenue Arts (The Untitled Play about Art School, dir. L. Nicol Cabe), and Annex Theatre (Eat Cake, dir. Catherine Blake Smith). Her/their shorter plays seen at Mo-Wave, The Pocket Theater, Volunteer Park, The Erickson Theater, and have been presented in association with MAP Theatre, ACT’s 1-Minute Play Festival, Fantastic Z. Theatre Company, Annex Theatre’s Spin the Bottle, and in Portland OR with Fuse Theatre Ensemble. Nelle is a 2015 and 2017 Lambda Literary Fellow in Playwriting where she studied with Cherríe Moraga and Phillip Howze respectively. She/they were shortlisted for the 2016 Sewanee Writers Conference, and she/they’re a semi-finalist for the 2018 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. She/they're currently based in Seattle.
JULIANY TAVERAS is a writer, facilitator, & aspiring gardener from Ayití by way of Lenapehoking. they wake up everyday on a strange & miraculous planet with the mission of crafting new, just worlds into existence. their storytelling manifests as plays—among them Desarrollo (The Lark’s Playwrights' Week, Corkscrew Theater Festival); the anatomy of light (Kilroys' List, 50 Playwrights Project List); & YAELIS (Page 73 Finalist)—as well as through poetry, photography, graphic design, & teaching artistry. everything they do // make // dream of centers bodies in diaspora, & exists in relentless pursuit of Black liberation & Indigenous sovereignty.
R. ERIC THOMAS, a national bestselling author and playwright, won the 2016 Barrymore Award for Best New Play and the 2018 Dramatist Guild Lanford Wilson Award and was a finalist for the 2017 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award. He is the recipient of a 2017/2018 National New Play Network Commission and has also been commissioned or produced by Arden Theatre Company, Baltimore Center Stage, Theatre Exile, Simpatico Theatre, Azuka Theatre, Single Carrot Theatre, About Face Theatre, City Theatre Miami, Act II Playhouse and more. He is also the long-running host of The Moth in Philadelphia and D.C. and a Senior Staff Writer for Elle.com where he writes “Eric Reads the News,” a daily current events and culture column with hundreds of thousands of monthly readers. His debut memoir-in-essays, HERE FOR IT, was published by Ballantine Books in February 2020 and RECLAIMING HER TIME, a biography of Rep. Maxine Waters co-authored with Helena Andrews-Dyer, will be published in fall 2020. Recent productions include SAFE SPACE (Single Carrot Theatre), MRS HARRISON (Azuka Theatre, Barrymore nomination - Best New Play), MIRIAM1234 (City Theatre Miami) and TIME IS ON OUR SIDE (About Face Theatre & Simpatico Theatre). He is an alumnus of The Foundry, the Lambda Literary Fellowship, and the Ingram New Works Project at Nashville Repertory Theatre.
LUCY THURBER is the author of twelve plays: Transfers (produced by MCC), Where We’re Born, Ashville, Scarcity, Killers and Other Family, Stay, Bottom of The World, Monstrosity, Dillingham City, The Locus, Perry Street and The Insurgents. Her OBIE-winning five play cycle The Hill Town Plays was produced Off Broadway by Rattlestick Playwright’s Theater in-conjunction with The Cherry Lane Theater, The Axis Theater and The New Ohio Theatre. Her plays have also been produced at The Atlantic Theater Company, Labyrinth Theater Company and Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF). Lucy wrote the text for Quixote, conceived and directed by Lear deBessonet, a site-specific performance with the Psalters made for and with The Broad Street Community. Thurber is an alumni of New Dramatists, as well as a member of 13P, Labyrinth Theater Company and Rising Phoenix Rep. She has been commissioned by Williamstown Theater Festival, Playwrights Horizons, CATF, House on The Moon and Yale Rep. She is the recipient of Manhattan Theatre Club Playwriting Fellowship, the 1st Gary Bonasorte Memorial Prize for Playwriting, a proud recipient of a Lilly Award, a 2014 Obie Award for The Hill Town Plays, Best Play for Transfers, Off Broadway Alliance and the Helen Merrill Award. Thurber’s short film Beloved was directed by Will Frears and starred Chloe Sevigny. She’s also written films for Lionsgate, Maven Films, and Steve Shainberg & Deborah Granick. Currently she is writing a film for Nanette Burstein and Sarah Paulson. For TV, Lucy has written for “NOS4A2,” “Sweetbitter” & “Outer Range”.
JONATHAN TOLINS is best known as the author of Buyer & Cellar, for which he won a Lucille Lortel Award, and which was named “Best Unique Theatrical Experience” by the Off-Broadway Alliance when it premiered at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater before moving on to a long, successful run at the Barrow Street Theatre, a national tour, and a London engagement at the Menier Chocolate Factory. It has since had over a hundred productions and was shown on the WNET series, Theater Close-Up. Other plays include The Twilight of the Golds (Broadway, Booth Theatre), If Memory Serves (Promenade), The Last Sunday in June (Rattlestick, Century Center), Secrets of the Trade (Primary Stages), and The Forgotten Woman (Bay Street Theater). A collection of his plays has been published by Grove/Atlantic. He was also represented on Broadway by additional material written with his husband, Robert Cary, for the revival of On the Town. His film work includes The Twilight of the Golds starring Brendan Fraser and Faye Dunaway, and Martian Child starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet, both co-written with Seth E. Bass. For television, he was a writer for Queer as Folk (Showtime, first season, co-producer), the 2000 and 2002 Academy Awards, the 2003 Tony Awards, Partners (CBS, consulting producer), BrainDead (CBS, consulting producer) and is currently an executive producer for The Good Fight (CBS All Access). In addition, he and Robert Cary wrote the script for Grease Live!, the Emmy award-winning live broadcast based on the classic musical, and A Christmas Story Live!, both for Fox TV. Jon was the author of Pushkin 200: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall, acted as script consultant on Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular, and co-wrote The Divine Millennium Tour and The Showgirl Must Go On for Bette Midler. He has written articles for Opera News, Opera Monthly, TheaterWeek, Time Magazine, and The Huffington Post, and is a regular panelist on the Metropolitan Opera Radio Quiz. Jon lives in Fairfield, Connecticut with his husband and their children, Selina and Henry. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America.
JASON TSENG is a queer, non-binary Chinese-American playwright based in New York City, originally hailing from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Their plays have been presented and developed by Flux Theatre Ensemble, Judson Arts, Mission to dit(Mars), Theatre COTE, Inkubator Arts, Second Generation, Downtown Urban Arts Festival, and LA Queer New Works Festival. They are a Creative Partner of Flux Theatre Ensemble, a member of The Civilians’s 2019/2020 R&D Group, a member of Mission to dit(Mars)’s Propulsion Lab, and their plays have been honored as Semi-finalists for the New American Voices Playwrights Festival and the Eugene O’Neil National Playwrights Conference. Jason’s full-length plays include Rizing (World Premier, Flux Theatre Ensemble), Like Father, Same Same, Ghost Money, Fear and Wonder, and The Other Side. Find more at www.jasontseng.co
BRYNA TURNER is a Brooklyn-based playwright originally from Northern California. Her play Bull in a China Shop premiered at LCT3, and was produced by About Face Theatre in Chicago. Her work has also been developed with Abingdon Theater Company, Clubbed Thumb, Colt Coueu, Ensemble Studio Theater, Mendocino Theatre Company, Mount Holyoke College, Rainbow Theatre Project, and Rutgers University. Other plays include: Lights Over Philo, The Stand-In, and How to Separate Your Soul from Your Body (in ten easy steps!). She is an alum of Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers Group, a MacDowell fellow, and holds an MFA in Playwriting from Rutgers University. She is currently working on a commission from Lincoln Center Theater and was awarded their Emerging Artist Award of 2018.
KEN URBAN is a playwright based in New York. His plays include A Guide for the Homesick (Huntington Theatre Company, Trafalgar Studios in the West End), The Remains (Studio Theatre), Sense of an Ending (59E59 Theatres, London’s Theatre503), Nibbler (The Amoralists and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater), The Correspondent (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater), The Awake (59E59 Theatres, First Floor Theater), and The Happy Sad (The Public Theatre/Summer Play Festival). Awards include Weissberger Playwriting Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the Independent Reviewers of New England’s Award for Best New Script, Headlands Artist Residency, Dramatist Guild Fellowship, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship, and MacDowell Colony Fellowships. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an affiliated writer at the Playwrights’ Center. Ken wrote the screenplay for the feature-film adaptation of The Happy Sad. His plays are published by Dramatists Play Service. He leads the band Occurrence and teaches dramatic writing at MIT.
DAVID VALDES is a writer outside Boston. He has been a Company One PlayLab Fellow, Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellow, Cimientos Fellow, and Brother Thomas Artist Fellow. His plays have been fully staged and presented in public readings across the US and UK. He has worked with Orlando Shakes, Fresh Ink, Rochester Rep, Company One, Actor's Theatre of Charlotte, Mixed Blood, Borderlands, Milagros, Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company, Stage Left, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Theater Offensive, and others. His plays have appeared at the Humana Festival, New York International Fringe Festival, Portland Stage Little Festival of the Unexpected, and New York Theatre Workshop Thursday Studio. His plays have published and anthologized by Samuel French. His plays have appeared twice in the National Showcase of New Plays, one of them enjoying a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere in 2018.
OMAR VÉLEZ MELÉNDEZ is a playwright born and raised in Puerto Rico. Their playwriting debut took place at the 2016 UPR Student Theatre Festival with The Natives Fight for Their Cave: Part 2. They are a member of Playgroup at Ars Nova and a 2020-2021 Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow. Their work has also been developed at The Lark, Teatro SEA, Pregones/PRTT, The Latinx Playwrights Circle and Fresh Ground Pepper. Plays include We Built Our Homes Near Kingdoms of Animals and Magic (The Lark's Playwright's Week, 2019 Rita & Burton Goldberg Playwriting Prize), ¡GARGOLA! (MCC LiveLabs), Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members and Lajasarriba. Playwriting MFA: Hunter College.
NOELLE VIÑAS is a playwright, educator, and theater-artist from Springfield, Virginia and Montevideo, Uruguay. She is a resident artist at Colt Coeur and a member of The Civilians ' 2020-2021 R&D Group. Her play DERECHO (2019 John Gassner Playwriting Award, 2019 Jane Chambers Honorable Mention) was workshopped as part of the 2020 Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Recent commissions include Weston Playhouse Theatre Company for her short play ZOOM INTERVENTION (NY Times Critic's Pick), FEEL THE SPIRIT for Shotgun Players, Lauren Gunderson's New Now Commission, and the book for THE LONG HORIZON, a space musical for Imagination Stage's Speak Out Onstage Ensemble. Previously, she was part of Playwrights Foundation's four-year Resident Playwrights Initiative and a 2019 Artist-in-Residence at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Her one-act play, LA PROFESORA (originally produced at TheatreFirst), is currently being rewritten to become the podcast ABUELITO with We Rise Production. This spring she will be graduating with her MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College where she studied under Erin Courtney, Elana Greenfield, Tina Satter, Anne Washburn, and Mónica de la Torre. Viñas resides in Brooklyn, where she is a proud member of the NYC Latinx Playwrights Circle.
PAULA VOGEL is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose plays are produced throughout the world. INDECENT opened on Broadway in April 2017 and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE received the Pulitzer Prize, Lortel Prize, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and New York Drama Critics awards for Best Play, and her second OBIE Award. Other plays include THE LONG CHRISTMAS RIDE HOME, THE MINEOLA TWINS, THE BALTIMORE WALTZ, HOT 'N' THROBBING, DESDEMONA, AND BABY MAKES SEVEN, THE OLDEST PROFESSION, A CIVIL WAR CHRISTMAS, and DON JUAN COMES HOME FROM IRAQ. Most recent awards include the American Theater Hall of Fame Award, the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, the Lillys, the Thornton Wilder Prize, the OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the NY Drama Critics’ Circle Award. She is honored to have three awards dedicated to emerging playwrights in her name: the American College Theater Festival, the Paula Vogel Award given annually by the Vineyard Theatre, and the recent Paula Vogel mentor’s award by Young Playwrights of Philadelphia. Her plays are published in six volumes by TCG Press and she teaches playwriting workshops throughout the United States and abroad. For more, please visit www.paulavogelplaywright.com
P.C. VERRONE is a writer, theatrical artist, and storyteller born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Harvard University in 2018. His short plays Eve and The Son Also Rises were produced in the Blank Theater's Young Playwrights Festival. His play Calamus was workshopped by The Custom Made Theater and a semi-finalist for the 2017 Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. His plays The Tamale Man and Slow Your Roll were featured in the Native Voices Short Play Festival. His four-part series, A Queer History of American Food, an exploration of LGBTQ+ history through iconic Amerian dishes, was produced by Center Theatre Group's Digital Stage in 2021 and is available on their Community Stories website. Through his perspective as a queer man of mixed Black, Italian, Osage, and Kiowa heritage, he uses his work to explore and uplift underrepresented facets of American culture and history. Recently, his creative interests have focused on the intersections of race, coloniality, eco-justice, and queerness. The driving factor behind much of his work is building productive, supportive, and beautiful spaces. He is a 2021-2022 Playwrights’ Center Many Voices Fellow. He was recently selected as a participant in the inaugural Black Creatives Revision Workshop, a collaboration between We Need Diverse Books and Penguin Random House. He's currently working on a commission from the Urbanite Theater as well as his debut novel. When he isn't writing, he enjoys supporting local drag artists and baking with his fiancé.
HAYGEN-BRICE WALKER is a half-Puerto Rican, half-(white) trailer trash playwright-creative producer born and raised in a desolate swamp (by professional bodybuilding parents) in the American South and currently dividing his time between Philadelphia, Nashville, and New York City [because throuples are sexy and fun]. In Philadelphia, Haygen-Brice is Co-Founder [along with Director-Producer Elaina Di Monaco] of ON THE ROCKS and is an alum of PlayPenn's The Foundry and InterAct's Core Playwrights. In Nashville, Haygen-Brice is developing demolition swamp a queer HGTV monster play as part of Nashville Repertory Theatre's Ingram New Works Lab and in New York City he is part of Page 73's 2020 Interstate 73 Writers' Group. He is also an Affiliated Writer with the Playwrights' Center where he was a 2018-2019 Jerome Many Voices Fellow. WOLFCRUSH (A QUEER WEREWOLF PLAY IN THREE ACTS) was named an Honorable Mention for The Relentless Award by The American Playwriting Foundation in 2018. Haygen-Brice's work is like if Streetcar Named Desire, Mean Girls, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Beloved got trashed at a Buffalo Wild Wings' happy hour and then stumbled into the neighborhood bathhouse while belting the soundtrack of In The Heights.
YORK WALKER is an award-winning writer based in Harlem, New York. Walker is the inaugural recipient of the Vineyard Theatre's Colman Domingo Award, where he is currently an artist in residence. He is also a member of Marcus Gardley's New Wave Writer's Workshop. His work includes Holcomb & Hart (Victory Garden's New Plays For A New Year Festival), Asè (Harlem9, Harlem Stage, and Lucille Lortel Theatre's Consequences digital series), The Séance (Winner of the John Singleton Short Film Competition, 48 Hours… in Harlem), Covenant (Fire This Time Festival, Access Theatre’s 4 Flights Up Festival, Arizona Theatre Company's Digital Play Series), White Shoes (Fire This Time Festival), Summer Of ’63 (The Actors Company Theatre’s New TACTics Festival, Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Apprentice Reading Series) and Of Dreams To Come (American Conservatory Theatre’s New Work Series). York received his MFA in acting from American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco.
ELSE WENT (they/she) is a Brooklyn based playwright and current member of The Public Theatre Emerging Writer's Group. Their work has been previously developed with The Tank, International Shakespeare Center, and The Brick. Former fellow at MacDowell Colony, Playwrights Realm, Trans Theatre Lab @ WP&The Public, and Living Room Theatre. Commissions include Weston Playhouse (Mirror Game; short), Parity Productions 2018 (Boxcar), and Florida Studio Theatre (Gutter Girl; short). Else has received residencies from Stillwright and Barn Arts Collective. Semifinalist for Shakespeare's New Contemporaries (Courage!) and the O'Neill Conference (Initiative). Co-founder and playwright of The Renovationists, and also serves variously as a sound designer.
JOSH WILDER is a playwright and producer from Philadelphia. His work has been developed; commissioned; and produced at various regional theaters and festivals across the country including The Fire This Time Festival, Classical Theatre of Harlem, New York Theatre Workshop, True Colors Theatre Company, The Kennedy Center, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2015 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, PlayPenn, Company One, InterAct Theatre Company, and Yale Rep. Past awards include the Holland New Voices Award, The Lorraine Hansberry Award, The Rosa Parks Award, and The ASCAP Cole Porter Prize. Josh is a former Jerome Fellow and the first national recipient of the Jerome Many Voices Fellowship at The Playwrights’ Center. He has been in residence at The Royal Court Theatre ; Sundance at UCross; and served as Co-Artistic Director at The Yale Cabaret for its 50th season and Co- Founder/Producer of the New Griots Black Arts Festival in The Twin Cities with Jamil Jude. Currently, he’s stationed in Los Angeles leading the next generation of emerging writers at The Playwrights Workshop; and serves as Artistic Associate at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, NY. MFA: Yale School of Drama. BFA: Carnegie Mellon.
TRACEY SCOTT WILSON: Co-producer of "The Americans" on FX. Recent productions include PREP at Pillsbury House Theatre; BUZZER at the Public Theater, Goodman Theatre, Pillsbury House Theatre, and the Guthrie Theater; and THE GOOD NEGRO and THE STORY at the Public Theater as well as the Goodman Theatre. Additional productions: ORDER MY STEPS for Cornerstone Theater’s Black Faith/AIDS project in Los Angeles; EXHIBIT #9, which was produced in New York City by New Perspectives Theatre and Theatre Outrageous; LEADER OF THE PEOPLE, which was produced at New Georges; two ten-minute plays produced at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; and 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 Theater, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Soho Theatre Writers Centre in London. She won the 2014 Joyce Award, two Van Lier Fellowships from the New York Theatre Workshop, a residency at Sundance Ucross and Sundance Theatre Laboratory, the 2001 Helen Merrill Emerging Playwright Award, the 2003 AT&T Onstage Award, the 2004 Whiting Award, the 2004 Kesselring 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 Playwrights 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.
DOUG WRIGHT earned the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for his play I Am My Own Wife. Other Broadway works include War Paint, Grey Gardens (Tony nomination), The Little Mermaid and Hands on a Hardbody. Film credits include Quills, based on his Obie Award-winning play and nominated for three Academy Awards. Television credits include Tony Bennett: An American Classic, directed by Rob Marshall. Honors include the Benjamin Dank Prize (the American Academy of Arts and Letters), the Tolerance Prize (Kulturforum Europa) and the Paul Selvin Award (Writers Guild of America). He is the president of the Dramatists Guild, a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, a frequent guest at Yaddo, and serves on the board of the New York Theatre Workshop. Mr. Wright is married to singer/songwriter David Clement.
KIT YAN is a NYC based transgender writer, born in Enping, China, and raised in the Kingdom of Hawaii. They are the 2021 reipient of the Kleban Prize for most promising book of a musical, and a recipient of the vivace Award for big ideas in theater. Kit has been a fellow at the Dramatists Guild Foundation, Lincoln Center, MacDowell, the Playwrights' Center, and the Musical Theater Factory. Their work has been produced by the Smithsonian, American Repertory Theater, Musical theater Factory, the New York Musical Festival, Weston Playhouse, NY Rep, Keen Company, and Diversionary Theater. They are currently in development at Playwrights Horizons, 5th Avenue Theater, the Village Theater, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and San Diego Rep. Their award-winning musical, Interstate, opened to rave reviews at Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis and is in development with New York Stage and Film, East West Players, and MCC Theater. Kit's first play Queer Heartache won 5 awards at the Chicago and SF Fringe Festivals, and their second musical, MISS STEP, received grants from NAMT and ASCAP to continue development at Playwrights Horizons and their play Mr. Transman has received support from Sundance to continue development.
SHARIFA YASMIN (she/her) is a trans Egyptian-American director and playwright from South Carolina. She has completed fellowships with the Drama League, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Manhattan Theatre Club, Geva Theatre, and is currently a 2020-21 National Directing Fellow with the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. Yasmin graduated cum laude from Winthrop University and starting Fall 2021 will be a Brown/Trinity MFA Directing Candidate. As a playwright, her work reflects the intersection of queerness and Arab-American identity.
CHAY YEWs 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 is recently edited a new anthology “Version 3.0: Contemporary Asian American Plays” for TCG Publications.
GINA YOUNG (she/they) is an award-winning playwright, director and performer whose theatrical work weaves together movement, music, and queer feminist themes. Recent works include STRAIGHT PLAY (a queer beach blanket bingo musical), BUTCH BALLET, This Is Why I Don't Come Home and the short pandemic play ROOM TONE. Born and raised in Washington DC, Gina currently lives in Los Angeles, where her work has been presented by The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Highways, Los Angeles Performance Practice/LAX Festival, USC’s Visions & Voices Series, The Los Angeles LGBT Center and the Women’s Center for Creative Work. They are a winner of the HUMANITAS/PLAY LA Prize, a Finalist for Center Theatre Group’s Richard E. Sherwood Award, a 2018 Directors Lab West selectee, and a winner of the Jane Chambers Award for Playwriting for her play Femmes: A Tragedy, which is published by NoPassport Press. She has toured nationally and internationally with original performance work. Gina is the creator of SORORITY, a new works salon for women, trans and queer performing artists that has become a hub for queer and feminist performance in Los Angeles. They are also the creator of Feminist Acting Class, a revolutionary experiment in actor training that has been presented at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, The Hammer Museum and Directors Lab West. Gina studied Drama at NYU/Tisch. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and a proud member of the new class of The Kilroys. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Stranger. Her primary interest is queering content and form.
NATHAN YUNGERBERG is a Brooklyn-based Afrosurrealist and storyteller whose plays have been developed or featured by The Cherry Lane Theatre, JAG Productions, LAByrinth Theater, Lorraine Hansberry Theater, The National Black Theatre, The Fire This Time Festival, 48 Hours in Harlem, The Lark, Roundabout Theatre Company, The Playwrights’ Center, American Blues Theater, Crowded Fire Theater, Climate Change Theatre Action, The Sheen Center, The August Wilson Red Door Project, and The Bushwick Starr. He is one of seven Black playwrights commissioned by The New Black Fest for HANDS UP: 7 Playwrights, 7 Testaments published by Samuel French, and adapted by BBC radio afternoon drama. Nathan’s play Esai’s Table was featured in The Cherry Lane Theatre’s 2017 Mentor Project (Mentored by Stephen Adly Guirgis). Awards, honors and residencies: 2021 National Black Theatre of Harlem I AM SOUL residency, Blue Ink Playwriting Award (Finalist), 2019 Djerassi Resident Artist, The 2016 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference (Semifinalist), Ken Davenport 10-Minute Play Festival (Winner). Educator and mentor experience includes guest playwright at Monroe Community College, mentor and guest instructor at Playwrights Horizons Theater School/NYU, mentor with I Am Project Philadelphia, and community education and consultant for Black Theatre initiatives at Roundabout Theatre Company. Nathan is also a writer for Sesame Street.