Sarah Dooley is a playwright, screenwriter, and singer-songwriter originally from Indiana. She graduated this year with a concentration in playwriting from Barnard College, where she also acted in student productions. Her play My Play recently won the American Avant-Garde Arts Festival in New York City. Sarah is excited and honored to be a part of the Playwrights’ Center Core Apprentice program.

Diana Grisanti, a Louisville, Kentucky native, is the inaugural recipient of the Marsha Norman Spirit of Achievement Lilly Award. She was a nominee for the Wasserstein Prize and a runner- up for the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Award for her play Semantics. Her short play Post Wave Spectacular was produced in the 2010 Humana Festival, and her musical Richie Farmer Will Have His Revenge on Durham (written with the fabulous composer/lyricist Matt Schatz) was Best of Fest in Austin’s Frontera Fest. Diana received her BA from the University of Iowa and is currently pursuing her MFA in playwriting and fiction at UT Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. Before relocating to Texas, she lived in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she worked as a teacher and translator.

Krista Knight’s plays have been produced by The Ontological Hysteric Theater, The Ashland New Plays Festival, The Hangar Theatre, Brown University, LiveGirls!, Harvest Theatre, Goshen College, The Attic Theatre, The New Perspective Festival, The Pan Theatre, and The Bus Barn Stage Company among others. Commissions include The Assembly, Livegirls!, The Berkeley Rep Theater School, and Class Act. Krista has been in Residence at New York Mills, WordBRIDGE Playwrights Lab, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Interplay in Australia, UCROSS, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Winner of the 2011 KCACTF Musical Theater Award from the Kennedy Center. 2007 Page 73 Playwriting Fellow. 2011-2012 Shank Playwriting Fellow at the Vineyard Theatre. BA: Brown University. MA: Performance Studies from NYU. MFA Playwriting: UC San Diego. www.KristaKnight.com

Matt McGeachy is a Twin Cities-based dramaturg and writer. Educated at the University of Toronto and the University of Minnesota, his dramaturgy experience includes Macondo, The Scottsboro Boys, Crispin Whittell's A Christmas Carol, and A Winter's Tale at the Guthrie Theater; numerous workshops and Early Stage readings at The Playwrights' Center; and the 2011 Kennedy Center New Play Dramaturgy Intensive in Washington, D.C., under the tutelage of Mark Bly. He is formerly theatre critic for MONDO Magazine in Toronto and is an occasional contributor to MinnesotaPlaylist.com. Working with playwrights to develop new plays is his passion and he is delighted to serve as a Core Apprentice Dramaturg for 2011 - 2012.

Dan O'Neil is a writer for stage and screen whose plays include The Wind Farmer, Dionysus at the Summer Olympics, Baggage, and kite&mountain along with numerous others. His work has been produced or developed at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, Great Plains Theater Conference, Red Eye Theater, Bedlam Theater, Commedia Beauregard, Minnesota Fringe Festival and by Lamb Lays with Lion Co. (all MN), Links Hall (IL), Barter Theater (Virginia), Centre Theater (South Carolina), through ARTICULTURE (Commission Project, PA), and on the main stage at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a two- time winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Screenwriting Award (totaling $27,000), winner of the Mary Marlin Fisher Playwriting Award, and was a finalist for the Global Age Project in 2010 and the Woodward/Newman Drama award in 2011. Dan is a founding member of the art/ theater collective Lamb Lays with Lion. He holds a B.A. in performance from the University of Minnesota and an M.F.A in dramatic writing from Carnegie Mellon University.

Riti Sachdeva is a theatre maker, dancer, and cultural worker. As an actor, she has worked with Omnirootz, Working Classroom, Words Afire, PBS, Disneychannel, and performed her original work with Kalapani Productions at festivals in LA and Toronto. For her playwriting, Riti has been awarded fellowships to the Kennedy Center MFA Play Development Workshop, the O’Neill Playwriting Festival, and a Center for Regional Studies grant to develop her flamenco play La Fea: A FlamenChoreoMyth. Her play Parts of Parts & Stitches won the 2009-10 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival’s Quest for Peace award, the 2011 Excellence in Playwriting award at the National Newborn Festival, and is being produced by MT Works in NYC in March 2012. She received her MFA in Dramatic Writing from the University of New Mexico in May 2011. She is founder and artistic organizer of midNite’s cHiLd Productions http://www.facebook.com/midniteschild.

Andrew Saito’s work has been featured at the Cutting Ball Theatre’s Risk Is This… New Experimental Play Festival, as well as the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Intersection for the Arts, Mixed Phoenix Theatre Group, Montalvo Arts Center, the Asian American Theatre Company, Brava Theatre, and Handful Players. He has taught playwriting in Mayan communities in Guatemala, and collaborated with the Andean theatre company Kusiwasi, and the legendary Peruvian theatre collective Yuyachkani. He has been a finalist for a Jerome Fellowship at the Playwrights’ Center of Minneapolis, the Princess Grace Playwriting Award at New Dramatists, and twice an alternate for a Fulbright Fellowship in Creative Writing. He recently graduated from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and is a proud member of the Playwrights Foundation’s Resident Playwrights Initiative, and Cut the Rhino, a 5-member theatre collective formed by the 2011 graduating class of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop.

Benjamin Weiner is a recent graduate of Columbia, where he majored in drama. He started out creating sound designs and music for productions at Columbia and Barnard; some favorites were Julius Caesar and Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice. Then, under the guidance of Ellen McLaughlin and Sylvan Oswald, he developed his sound experience into his thesis, Wave Point. This play, which he will develop further this year with the Core Apprentice program, explores issues of hearing, deafness, and alienation. He is also writing a musical, Pants, which enjoyed a workshop and reading at Columbia this past spring. Benjamin has worked at the Jim Henson Company and Chicago City Limits Improv, and is now creating bizarre sounds for Dan Dietz's Afraid of the Dark, opening at the Little Shubert Theatre this fall.