Elisabeth R. Finch is a playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. 

Her plays, But Dust and Ash, All Politics Aside,  Unsung Psalm, and her adaptation of Terry Tempest William’s Refuge:  An Unnatural History of Family and Place were seen and/or developed at the Kennedy Center/American College Theater Festival; WorkShop Theater (NYC); Wichita State; Carnegie Mellon, and USC’s School of Theatre. Elisabeth also developed a youth theater program at the American School of Madrid, featuring her adaptations of The Story of Ferdinand The Bull and The Empty Pot.

Her essays: Lucky Day, All Politics Aside, I Am Not...A Piece of Ass and Big Fat Hassle(hoff) are published in the online magazines Fresh Yarn and Women-in-Film's Traction. She is a two-time recipient of the Mesa Refuge Writers’ Residency.

She won the 2004 Television Academy Arts and Sciences Script Writing Internship; served as Writer’s Assistant to Rick Cleveland for NBC/Universal; and was most-recently Writers’ Assistant for Alan Ball’s True Blood on HBO.

Elisabeth earned her MFA in TV Writing from USC’s School of Cinema-Television and her BA in Drama and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University with additional theater coursework at Northwestern University.

Kristen Palmer is a 2008-09 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights Center and a Fall 2008 Playwright in residence at the William Inge Center for the Arts.  Her play, The Melting Point, was a finalist for 2008 National Playwright's Conference at the O'Neill Center. She has been a semi-finalist for PlayLabs and the P73 Fellowship. Her plays include: Local Story, Departures, All the Girls Love Bobby Kennedy, The Melting Point, The Heart in Your Chest, and many shorter ones including Something Decent, The Ruby Red Wrench, Seattle/Siberia, Marina and the Pole and Sad (written with Adam Szymkowicz).

Her plays have been produced and developed with P73, Overlap Productions, Blue Coyote Theatre, Soho Rep, Clubbed Thumb, Nascent Works, New Georges, Manhattan Theatre Source, FLUX, Six Figures, the Orlando Shakespeare Festival's Harriet Lake Festival of New Plays, Printer's Devil Theatre, On the Boards, Four of Us Productions and Theatre of NOTE, Madcap Players, Cardboard Box Collaborative, and Marist College among others.

She received a BA in Dramatic Arts at Bretton Hall College and an MA from NYU's Gallatin School. She is an associate artist of New Georges, a Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab Alumni, and a member of P73's writing group.

Monica Raymond is a prize-winning poet and playwright. She is committed to writing plays which use humor, surprise, and deep feeling to make us question our preconceptions and move towards greater freedom, courage, and peace. She is a Jerome Fellow for 2008-09 at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, and was a finalist in the 2006 Massachusetts Cultural Council awards in Playwriting. She has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony, and has received grants from the Book of the Month Club, the Cambridge Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

Raymond’s plays include The Owl Girl, about two families in the Middle East who both have keys to the same house (Clauder Gold Medal 2006; Little Festival of the Unexpected 2007, Portland Stage); Safe House (Panelists Choice Award, Last Frontier Theater Conference; O’Neill Finalist); Creche (Boston Playwrights Platform prize; published in Dramatic Publishing’s anthology 35 in 10); Lindsay (Subversive Theater, 2005 Montreal and NYC Infringement Festivals); Novices (Centastage Plays on Tap, Boston Theatre Marathon 2008) and many others. Her short play Hijab has been performed widely, including at the 2007 Boston Theater Marathon, the Vital Theater (NYC), the Samuel French Festival, and as part of “Occupied Territories: Palestinian- and Jewish-American Plays about the Middle East” at Boston Playwrights Theatre.

Raymond hosted a panel “Making Theatre about Palestine/ Israel” at the 2005 Conference of the Association for Theater in Higher Education, and toured as a performer in An Olive on the Seder Plate, a play by and for American Jews about human rights in Israel/Palestine. She has performed her own monologues and performance scores at Mobius, the Boston Museum School, and as part of Joe Chaikin's "Disability Project” at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Raymond holds degrees from the University of Chicago (BA Humanities), Columbia University (MA English) and Smith College (MFA Theatre/Playwriting) and has taught writing and literature at Harvard, CUNY, and the Boston Museum School.

Mat Smart is the author of ten full-length plays, the book & lyrics of one musical, and numerous one-acts. Recently, The 13th of Paris premiered at City Theatre in Pittsburgh (dir. by Melia Bensussen). The Hopper Collection is published by Broadway Play Publishing and a monologue from the play will be included in Smith and Kraus’ Best Men’s Monologues 2008. It was produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco (dir. by Chris Smith) and Huntington Theatre Company in Boston (dir. by Daniel Aukin).

Mr. Smart is a co-founder of Slant Theatre Project, serves on the Board of Directors for The New Harmony Project and is a member of Ars Nova’s Play Group. He has been commissioned by South Coast Rep and Huntington.

His plays have received readings, workshops and development at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project, Manhattan Theatre Club, Cherry Lane, Soho Rep, The Lark, Coyote Rep, South Coast Rep, Huntington, Pittsburgh Public, Geva, Marin Theatre Company, Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre & Actors’ Express, and Chicago’s White Horse Theatre Company.

A graduate of the University of Evansville, he holds an MFA in Playwriting from University of California – San Diego. An avid Chicago Cubs fan, he has seen games at twenty-five of the current baseball stadiums.

Joy Tomasko is a playwright and multi-disciplinary collaborative artist. In 2007, her play Unfold Me was directed by Linsay Firman and presented off-Broadway at the Summer Play Festival. My End has received readings at the Lark and Soho Think Tank; Rub at Paper Beats Rock and Underbelly, Underheart at Women’s Project. Site-specific work includes Rose Pie for Producer Marisa Viola for the Community Garden on Ave. B and Keep the Change co-written with playwright Christina Gorman for Women’s Project and the World Financial Center in NYC.

Joy worked as a writer alongside Cuban playwright Agnieska Hernández on the US-Cuba collaboration The Closest Farthest Away/ Entrañable Lejanía, a theater/music/new media hybrid.

Joy is currently collaborating with choreographer Martha Mason, visual artist Wendy Richmond and director Meiyin Wang on a new media theater piece for Women's Project entitled Talk Soon. An alum of Women’s Project Playwrights Lab, Joy received her MFA at CalArts in 2006 under the tutelage of Erik Ehn and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Prior to CalArts, Joy assisted John Dias, Bonnie Metzgar and George C. Wolfe at The Public Theater for six seasons on productions on and off-Broadway and at The Delacorte Theater in Central Park. She’s taught classes at both Fordham University and CalArts and developed various works in the Czech Republic, Serbia, Rwanda, and Uganda. Joy was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in Winter 2008.