Lee Blessing's play's include: A Walk In The Woods (Broadway and London's West End), Going to St. Ives, (Outer Critic’s Circle Award, Best Play, Obie for ensemble performance); Thief River (Drama Desk nomination, Best Play); Cobb (Drama Desk award, best ensemble); Chesapeake, Eleemosynary and Down The Road.  In the 1992-93 Signature Theatre season: Fortinbras, Lake Street Extension, Two Rooms and the world premiere of Patient A. 

Recent regional world premieres:  A Body of Water at the Guthrie Theater and the Old Globe Theatre; Lonesome Hollow, Flag Day and Whores, all at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival; The Scottish Play at La Jolla Playhouse; Black Sheep at Florida Stage and The Winning Streak at George Street Playhouse. Other plays: Independence, Riches, Oldtimers Game and Nice People Dancing To Good Country Music and Perilous Night, which will be stage-read at the Colorado New Play Summit in January.

Other awards: The American Theater Critics Circle Award, the L.A. Drama Critics Award, The Great American Play Award, The Humanitas Award and the George and Elisabeth Marton Award among others. Nominations for Tony and Olivier awards, as well as for the Pulitzer Prize. Blessing is married to playwright and TV writer Melanie Marnich and lives in New York  He heads the graduate playwriting program at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.

Andy Bragen's honors include a Workspace Residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission, a Tennessee Williams Fellowship from Sewanee: The University of The South, a Jerome Fellowship, a New Voices Fellowship from EST, a Dramatists Guild Fellowship, and residencies at Millay Colony and Blue Mountain Center. Andy's plays and translations have been seen and heard at numerous theatres across the country, including the Guthrie Theater, PS122, the Playwrights' Center, Queens Theatre in the Park, Rattlestick, LAByrinth, EST, Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep, Repertorio Español, the University of Rochester and the Lark. For more info: www.andybragen.com.

"I have gained a lot from my previous collaborations with the Playwrights Center, both as a Jerome Fellow and as a writer and translator at PlayLabs. Core membership will allow me to continue that collaboration. I'm looking forward to getting back to Minneapolis."

Barbara Field, has had work produced across the United States, Canada and Europe.  She served as playwright-in-residence at the distinguished Guthrie Theater from 1974 to 1981, creating a number of pieces: her translations include Marriage (Gogol), Monsieur de Moliere (Bulgakov), and Pantalgleize (Ghelderode).  Adaptations for the Guthrie from novels include Camille (Dumas) and Playing With Fire, a response to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  An adaptation commissioned by the Seattle Children’s Theater of Great Expectations later played at the Guthrie and traveled the country on an 8-month tour. A revival of Great Expectations recently won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award.  Field’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol has been a part of the Guthrie’s and the Missouri Rep’s seasons for 27 years.  For the Seattle Children’s Theater she adapted The Boxcar Children in 1999.   Her adaptation of Dreams in the Golden Country was recently performed at the Kennedy Center and on a national tour.  Her adaptation of Scaramouche was recently seen at the Washington Shakespear Theatre.

Her original work includes Neutral Countries, first produced at the Actors Theater of Louisville’s Humana Festival in 1983, where it was named Best American Play; Coming of Age for the Indiana Rep; Quality Time for the Pennsylvania Stage Company; Boundary Waters for California’s South Coast Rep (it subsequently won a 1992 DramaLogue Award); and Off the Ice for the Repertory Theater of St. Louis.  Currently, she is working on I Was a Rat! for the Seattle Children’s Theatre.

She has written one original opera libretto, Rosina (with composer Hiram Titus), which was commissioned and produced by the Minnesota Opera, and has subsequently been seen elsewhere around the country.  With Titus she created a musical, The Skinflint, for the Repertory Theater of St. Louis.  She has just completed a new comedy, The Book of Vashti.

Field is a founding member of The Playwrights’ Center, Minneapolis, and is a site reporter for the National Endowment for the Arts.  A book of seven of her plays for the Guthrie Theater, New Classics from the Guthrie Theater was published in 2003 by Smith & Kraus.

Barbara Field’s first anthology: Collected Plays, Volume One will be released later this month and available for purchase at The Playwrights’ Center. Collected Plays includes six of Field’s original works: Materia Medica, Matrix, Neutral Countries, The Education of Paul Bunyan, Boundary Waters, and Off The Ice.

 “There are many virtues to a single-author collection. One is the opportunity to really hear what’s distinctive in a playwright’s voice across a number of plays.” – Michael Bigelow Dixon, Foreward, Collected Plays.
“Off The Ice…a delightful three-ring circus…Field has crafted an imaginative, bawdy, surprise-a-minute play, sprinkled with some brilliant dialogue and driven by the thrilling theme: ‘The whole point of emancipation is you own yourself.’ “– Patricia Corrigan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

 “We walked out of Boundary Waters uplifted and high on the miracle of life. What an intelligent, articulate work… All the way home we talked non-stop, energized by the myriad concepts and dichotomous connections that Barbara Field presented. Critic’s Choice.” – Shirle Gottlieb, Drama-Logue.

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Keli Garrett’s plays and adaptations have been produced and developed at Dixon Place in NYC, Zoo District in L.A., Penumbra Theatre, the LAByrinth, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwrights Horizons, Rites and Reason Theatre, Victory Gardens, City Lit Theater, Chicago Theater Company, Organic Theater, and the California College of Arts and Crafts. The Rhode Island Arts Council, The Joyce Foundation, City Lit Theater and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum have commissioned her work. She holds an M.F.A. 1999 in Creative Writing from Brown University, was a Beinecke Foundation fellow, and has a B.A. in Theatre from Columbia College.

AIN GORDON is a three-time Obie Award-winning writer/director/actor, a two-time NYFA Fellow and the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting. His work has been commissioned/produced/presented by New York Theater Workshop, Soho Rep., The Public Theatre, 651 ARTS, Dance Theater Workshop, Performance Space 122, and HERE Arts Center (all NYC); the Mark Taper Forum (CA), the George Street Playhouse (NJ), the Krannert Center (IL), the Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), DiverseWorks (TX), Spirit Square (NC), VSA North Fourth Arts Center (NM), Jacob’s Pillow (MA), LexArts (KY), The Kitchen Theatre (NYS), and Dance Space (DC), etc. Gordon twice collaborated with choreographer Bebe Miller on works presented at the Wexner Center (OH), Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents (MT), and the Bates Dance Festival (ME), etc. Collaborations with David Gordon were commissioned and produced by American Repertory Theatre (MA), American Conservatory Theater (CA) and American Music Theatre Festival (PA). As a performer, Gordon was in the original Off-Broadway cast of Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell and continues to tour the production to venues including UCLA Live, Guild Hall (LI), TBA Festival at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR), The ICA Boston (Elliot Norton Award nom), Vineyard Playhouse (MA), the Walker Art Center (MN), and Painted Bride Art Center (PA), etc. Gordon also wrote for NBC’s “Will & Grace.” Gordon has received support from the Multi-Arts Production Fund (MAP), the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Peg Santvoord Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Performance Network, the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, AT&T OnStage, and the Arts Presenters Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Program funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Trust etc. Gordon’s 2003 work; Art Life & Show-Biz; A Non-Fiction Play, is published in Palgrave Macmillan’s new collection “Dramaturgy Of The Real On The World Stage.” Gordon has been a guest speaker/facilitator/teacher for the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (NY), the Surdna Foundation (NY), the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (MD), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (NY), the Kentucky Writer’s Conference, Dance USA (DC), the University of Minnesota, Wesleyan University (CT), the University of Limerick & the Dublin Dance Festival (Ireland), Chicago Dancemakers Forum and Columbia College (IL), Ohio State University, and Dartmouth College (NH), etc. Currently, Gordon is Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Creative Research, a member of the Board of Directors of Performance Space 122, and Chair of the Danspace Project Artist Advisory Board. Gordon is Co-Founder of the Urban Memory Project and has been Co-Director of the Pick Up Performance Co(S) since 1992.

Christina Ham's plays have been produced and developed both nationally and internationally with the Center Theatre Group, the Goodman Theatre, the Guthrie Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Penumbra Theatre, Off-Broadway at the SPF Summer Play Festival, and SteppingStone Theatre, among others. Christina is the recipient of a McKnight Advancement Grant and Jerome Fellowship from the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, the Marianne Murphy Women & Philanthropy Award in Playwriting, and a 2006 MacDowell Residency. A graduate of the University of Southern California and UCLA's M.F.A. Playwriting program, Christina is a Core Writer of the Playwrights' Center, a member playwright of the Workhaus Collective, and of the Dramatists Guild of America.

"I applied to the Core Writer program because I knew that if my work was ever going to grow I would need a creative home in which to develop it. I knew that one of the many benefits this program has to offer is the space to work with my collaborators in a risk-free environment, and it's an honor to be on the receiving end of such generosity provided by the Playwrights' Center."

Karen Hartman is a playwright and librettist whose current projects include Goliath, a drama set in the Gaza Strip (Winner of the 2008 Dorothy Silver Playwriting Prize, commissioned by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, workshops at the Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, McCarter Theater, Magic Theatre, Voice & Vision, Williamstown, and others); Donna Wants, a contemporary female Don Juan tale (A.C.T.’s First Look Festival, Theater at Boston Court); and the book for A Sea Change, music and lyrics by Annmarie Milazzo.

Carmen La Gitana, a musical directed by Cirque de Soleil’s Franco Dragone with score by John Ewbank, lyrics by Annmarie Milazzo, and a book co-written with Sarah Miles, begins an open run in Madrid, September 2008, in preparation for Broadway. Leah’s Train, a finalist for the Weissberger Award, will be produced by NAATCO (National Asian American Theater Company) in the spring of 2009. Additional plays are Gum (Women’s Project, Center Stage, Magic Theater, P73, published by Theater Communications Group and Dramatists Play Service, in continuous production nationwide); Going Gone (N.E.A. New Play Grant, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park); Anatomy 1968 (Summer Play Festival on Theater Row); Girl Under Grain (Best Drama in NY Fringe, extended by P73); Troy Women (based on Euripides, Yale Repertory Theater/School of Drama, published by Backstage Books in Divine Fire), and several others.

Musical works include Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl, based on Lewis Carroll with music by Gina Leishman (AT&T Onstage Award, Dallas Theater Center, published by Playscripts, Inc.), and Motherbone, an opera composed by Graham Reynolds (Loewe Award, Salvage Vanguard Theater). Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the N.E.A., the Helen Merrill Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, a Daryl Roth “Creative Spirit” Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholarship to Jerusalem. An alumna of New Dramatists, Yale University, and the Yale School of Drama, Karen has taught playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and many other venues, and also teaches private writing workshops.

BROADWAY:  “Never Gonna Dance” (book). 

OFF-BROADWAY:  “Three Viewings” and “A Picasso” at Manhattan Theatre Club; “Scotland Road” and “The Turn of the Screw” at Primary Stages; “Tuesdays with Morrie (with Mitch Albom) at The Minetta Lane; “Murder by Poe,”  “The Turn of the Screw,” and “The Spy” at The Acting Company; “Neddy” at American Place; and “Fellow Travelers” at Manhattan Punchline. 

OTHER PLAYS/THEATERS:  “Compleat Female Stage Beauty,” “Mrs. Mannerly,” “Murderers,” “Mercy of a Storm,”  “Smash,” “Armadale,” “Korczak’s Children,” “To Fool the Eye,” “The Falls,” “A Piece of the Rope,” “All the Way with LBJ,” “The Government Inspector,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and others at The Guthrie, Old Globe, Yale Rep, The Geffen, Seattle Rep, Cincinnati Playhouse, Cleveland Playhouse, South Coast Rep, Arizona Theater Company, San Jose Rep, The Empty Space, Indiana Rep, Children’s Theater Company, History Theater, Madison Rep, Intiman, Illusion,  Denver Center, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Alabama Shakespeare Festival,  Milwaukee Rep, Repertory Theater of St. Louis, Actors Theater of Louisville, Philadelphia Theater Company, Asolo, City Theater, Studio Arena and dozens more in the U.S. and abroad. 

FILM/ TV:  “Stage Beauty,” “Casanova,”  “The Duchess” and episodes of “Columbo.” 

GRANTS/AWARDS:  NEA, TCG, Lila Wallace Fund, Rosenthal New Play Prize, Frankel Award, Charles MacArthur Fellowship Award, McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and Barrymore Award Best New Play.  He is a member and/or alumnus of The Playwrights Center, the Dramatists Guild, the Writers Guild, and New Dramatists. 

Cory Hinkle's plays include Little Eyes, Cipher, Phosphorescence, and SadGrrl13 and have been produced or developed at the Guthrie, ART, Williamstown Theater Festival, the SPF Summer Play Festival, The Playwrights Foundation, Illusion Theater, Rattlestick, Salvage Vanguard, Workhaus Collective, P73 Productions, Hangar Theater, and Red Eye Collective, among others.  Cory is a co-creator of Fissures (Lost and Found) commissioned by Actor’s Theater of Louisville and scheduled to premiere at the 2010 Humana Festival.  He has been commissioned by the Guthrie, is a former MacDowell Colony fellow, Sewanee Writer’s Conference Fellow and recipient of a Jerome Travel and Study Grant.  He is a Core Member of the Playwrights’ Center, a member playwright of the Workhaus Collective and he received two Jerome fellowships through the Playwrights' Center.  Cory earned his MFA in Playwriting from Brown University and his work is published by Playscripts Inc. and Heinemann.

Daniel Alexander Jones is a theatrical integrator whose work has met with audience acclaim for more than fifteen years. His live art fuses writing, performance, design and direction through dynamic collaboration. His theater pieces include The Book of Daniel,Bel Canto, Earthbirths, Blood:Shock:Boogie and Cab and Lena. Daniel received the prestigious Alpert Award in the Arts in Theatre in 2006. Daniel resides in Manhattan where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Visual Art at Fordham University and a resident playwright at New Dramatists.

Aditi Brennan Kapil is an actress, writer, and director, of Bulgarian and Indian descent, raised in Sweden, and currently residing in Minneapolis, MN. She is a graduate of Macalester College with a BA in English and Dramatic Arts. 

Her latest play, Love Person, a four part love story in Sanskrit, ASL and English, was developed during a Many Voices residency at the Playwrights' Center, work-shopped at the Lark Center for New Play Development in NY, and produced in a rolling world premiere at Mixed Blood Theatre (MN), Marin Theater (CA), and Phoenix Theatre (IN) as part of the National New Play Network CLNPF program. In 2008/09 it was produced by Live Girls! Theatre in Seattle, and Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. Love Person has been nominated for the Blackburn Prize, the Francesca Primus Award, and the ATCA/Steinberg Award. 

Aditi's current work-in-progress, Agnes Under The Big Top, a fairy tale, was selected as a Distinguished New Play Development Project by the NEA New Play Development Program hosted by Arena Stage, and was developed at the Lark Play Development Center (NY), Mixed Blood Theatre (MN), InterAct Theatre (PA), the Playwrights' Center (MN), and the Leon Katz Rhodopi International Theater Laboratory (Bulgaria). Agnes is slated to premiere at Mixed Blood Theatre in 2010.

Aditi's playwriting credits include a number of plays for youth, among them The Deaf Duckling, a bilingual (ASL & English) educational touring show about growing up Deaf, created in collaboration with Deaf performer Nic Zapko for Mixed Blood Theater, and The Adventures of Hanuman, King of the Monkeys, a Bollywood style musical inspired by tales from the Ramayana for SteppingStone Theater for Youth Development (March 2006). She has also collaborated on several productions with In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater, notably Gotama, a play about the early life of the Buddha, and Beneath the Surface, a water circus. She is currently developing Hanuman and the Girl Prince for SteppingStone Theatre for Youth, a play in iambic verse loosely based on an episode in the Mahabharata.

Messy Utopia, which she directed, and co-wrote with Seema Sueko, Velina Hasu-Houston, Janet Allard, and Naomi Iizuka, received an Ivey Award, and #6 in the City Pages Best of the Twin Cities 2007.

Adam Kraar's work includes a quartet of plays about American families living in Asia and a play inspired by the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project of the Civil Rights Movement. His plays have been produced and developed at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Primary Stages, Public Theater, Lark Theatre, Geva, Performance Network and many others. Fellowships from: Manhattan Theatre Club, Inge Center and Sewanee Writers' Conference. Plays published by: Dramatic Publishing, Smith & Kraus, and Applause Books (including four Best American Short Plays anthologies). Adam grew up in India, Thailand and Singapore; earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University; and teaches playwriting at Adelphi University.

"I applied to be a Core [Writer] to develop my work with a nation-wide community of artists and to share my plays with new audiences, including those in Minneapolis and on campuses. I believe the Playwrights' Center—both as an incubator and an advocate for new work—is vital to the future of the American theater."

Carson Kreitzer's The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer won the Lois and Richard Rosenthal New Play Prize, the American Theatre Critics' Steinberg Citation, the Barrie Stavis Award, and is published in Smith and Kraus' New Playwrights: Best Plays of 2004 and by Dramatic Publishing. Self Defense or death of some salesmen has been produced across the country, and is published by Playscripts and in Smith and Kraus' Women Playwrights: Best Plays of 2002.

Other work includes 1:23, Flesh and the Desert, a kaleidoscopic portrait of Las Vegas seen in New York's Summer Play Festival, The Slow Drag (New York and London), Freakshow, Slither, Dead Wait, and Take My Breath Away, featured in BAM's 1997 Next Wave Festival. Ms. Kreitzer has received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the NEA, TCG, and the Jerome and McKnight foundations. BA:Yale University, MFA: Michener Center for Writers, UT Austin.

A resident playwright at New Dramatists, an associated artist with Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, and the Fire Department, and a member of the Workhaus Collective, The Playwrights' Center and the Dramatists Guild, Ms. Kreitzer was the first Playwrights Of New York (PONY) fellow at the Lark Play Development Center.

Mona Mansour completed a year in the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater, where her play The Hour of Feeling was read. Its sequel, Urge for Going, was also read at the Public, as part of New Work Now!, and at Theater J, and will be part of the 2010 Ojai Playwrights Conference. Mona started as an actor, performing with L.A.'s Groundlings Theater. Her play Me and the S.L.A. ran at the Groundlings and Seattle Fringe Festival. Girl Scouts of America (co-written with Andrea Berloff) had readings at NYTW, New Work Now!, and a production in NYC Fringe 2006. Television: Dead Like Me (Showtime) and Queens Supreme (CBS).

"As an artist, finding a creative home—or two—is essential. I was pulled in by the chance to be in Minneapolis, a major theater town, at the Playwrights' Center, a place where I will be supported and challenged in the company of amazing theater makers."

Melanie Marnich’s plays include Quake, Blur, Tallgrass Gothic, Calling All, Beautiful Again, The Sparrow Project, These Shining Lives and A Sleeping Country. A Sleeping Country won the 2007 Kaplan Award for Playwriting from Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and received its world premiere there in March 2008. Her play, These Shining Lives, premiered at Baltimore Center Stage in April 2008 and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and the Weissberger Award in 2005. Her play Cradle of Man received the 2007 Carbonell Award for Best New Work of the Year and was a finalist for the 2006 Weissberger Award. Tallgrass Gothic was recognized as “Best New Script” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2006. The Sparrow Project was produced as part of Steppenwolf Theatre’s First Look Festival in August 2005. Blur received its world premiere Off Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club and also won the Francesca Primus Prize from Denver Center Theatre.

Two of her plays, Quake and Tallgrass Gothic, have premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays. Her adaptation of Katie Couric’s book, The Brand New Kid, premiered at the Kennedy Center in November 2006. Her awards include two McKnight Advancement Grants and two Jerome Fellowships from The Playwrights’ Center, the Samuel Goldwyn Award, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, the Otis Guernsey New Voices Playwriting Award and the Melvoin Award from Northlight Theatre (Chicago).

Her plays have been produced or developed at New York’s Public Theater, London’s Royal Court Theatre, the Guthrie Theater, Arena Stage, Portland Center Stage, The Actors Studio, Geva Theatre, Hyde Park Theatre, American Theatre Company, HERE and Denver Center for the Arts. Commissions include the Kennedy Center, Guthrie Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Arena Stage and South Coast Repertory. She is a Core Writer of The Playwrights’ Center and a member of New Dramatists. She currently writes for the HBO series, “Big Love.”

Laural Meade works as a playwright, director, and educator in her native Los Angeles. Her original plays about historical figures both infamous and obscure have been seen throughout Los Angeles, as well as in alternative venues in New York, Chicago, Seattle, Arizona and London. Her original musical work Harry Thaw Hates Everybody made its highly acclaimed world premiere at the Los Angeles Theater Center after a series of developmental readings in the Mark Taper Forum’s New Work Festival. Directed by Meade, Harry Thaw went on to win the Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle award for Best Writing, along with a variety of LA Weekly, Ovation and Garland awards and nominations for writing, directing, acting and design.

For the Mark Taper Forum, she recently co-created and wrote Animal Logic, a vaudevillian trunk show about man and animals. During the last two years this piece for young audiences played to over 6,000 children while on tour to Los Angeles elementary schools. Other recent credits include the world premiere of her original play, Leopold and Loeb: A Goddamn Laff Riot, named a critic’s pick by The Los Angeles Times and Back Stage West, and The Biggest Game of All, another piece for young audiences also produced by the Mark Taper Forum. Other original works include The Wide Open Ocean, a musical vaudeville about Los Angeles charlatan/evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson at The Actors’ Gang, a free adaptation of Pirandello’s Tonight We Improvise, recently workshopped with a cast of 37, and The Suffragist Roadshow, a semi-fictionalized account of a 1915 coast-to-coast roadtrip/publicity stunt which was originally commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum.

Laural holds an MFA in playwriting from UCLA and a BA in theater from Occidental College, where she is currently a member of the theater faculty. Other teaching and guest lecturer appointments include work at California Institute of the Arts, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, Cal State Los Angeles, and A.S.K. Theater Projects.

From 1990 to 1995, she was Co-Artistic Director of The Butane Group, an alternative performance ensemble based in Los Angeles. For The Group she wrote, produced and performed in a variety of non-fictive based performance works, including Semi-Automatic II: The Twelve Horror-Filled Days of Margery Kempe, Semi-Automatic III: Hermaphrodite!, Leopold & Loeb: A Goddamn Laff Riot, and Leopold and Loeb Are Dead Now for The Drama League’s New Directors/New Works Program. From 1996-2000 she was the Producing Director of the Indecent Exposure Theater Company, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to the creation of socially relevant new works for the stage. For Indecent Exposure she produced and directed a variety of projects including Harry Thaw Hates Everybody, and Susan Rubin’s plays Immortality, Mysteries in a Silver Box, and the award-winning musical club termina.

Additional new play development credits include the position of Literary Manager at LATC, where she collaborated closely with the late director Reza Abdoh, and Program Producer at A.S.K. Theater Projects, producing new plays by local, national, and international writers. She has served as a member of the National Literary Review Panel for the TCG/NEA playwriting residency program, and has been the recipient of grants from the California Arts Council, the Flintridge Foundation, the Brody Fund, the National/State/County Partnership and the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

Her current piece Rock Paper Scissors, written and directed with collaborator Corey Madden, was commissioned by Childsplay, a youth theater organization based in Tempe, Arizona. On tour through June 2009, this primarily non-verbal performance piece explores the effect of video gaming on creativity through solely utilizing the creative, sculptural and transformative possibilities of white paper.

Susan Miller is the recipient of two OBIE awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship in playwriting. Her play, A Map of Doubt and Rescue, won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Pinter Prize for Drama. It was workshopped by New York Stage and Film at Vassar and the Ojai Playwrights' Conference. Miller received an OBIE, as well as the shared Blackburn Prize, for her one woman play, My Left Breast, which premiered in Actor's Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival. Miller has performed the play at Trinity Repertory Co.; The Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia; The Group Theatre in Seattle; Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati; Theatre J in Washington, D.C, among others. My Left Breast had its international premiere in Paris at Le Foyer-Theatre Du Palais-Royal. It continues to be performed by Miller and others in the U.S, Europe, and Canada.

Miller won her first OBIE for Nasty Rumors and Final Remarks, which was produced in New York by Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre, as were her plays, For Dear Life and Flux, also produced by Second Stage. Her plays, Cross Country and Confessions of a Female Disorder were staged by the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Miller's other work includes Arts and Leisure; It's Our Town, Too; The Grand Design, and Reading List. Her work has also been done by Naked Angels, the Cast Theatre, and The Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference. She is currently working on a new full length play, Sweeping The Nation, which was given a reading in New York with a grant from Yaddo and the Maurer Family Foundation, and was workshopped at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis.

Miller has received playwriting fellowships from the NEA as well as a Rockefeller Grant and a residency at Yaddo. She served for three years as the director of the Legacy Project, a writing workshop for people with life threatening illness, which was held at the Public Theatre under a grant from the Lila Wallace Fund. During the spring semesters of 2006 and 2007, she taught the Goldberg Master Class in Playwriting at NYU.

As a screenwriter, Miller's work includes original feature screenplays for Disney, Warner Bros., Fox 2000, Universal, as well as the independent film, Lady Beware, starring Diane Lane. She has also written for ABC's "Thirtysomething," CBS's "Trials Of Rosie O'Neill", NBC's "LA Law," and FOX's "Urban Anxiety. She was a Consulting Producer on the first season of the acclaimed Showtime series, "The L Word." Her film, The Grand Design, based on her play, directed by Eric Stoltz and starring Frances Conroy and Eric Stoltz, will be released in 2008. She is currently co-writing and serving as Executive Producer on a new webseries, Anyone But Me

Susan Miller has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, American Theatre, The Dramatist, MS, and The Bark. She is a member of The Dramatist Guild, PEN, and the Writers Guild of American, East. Miller's plays are published in several volumes of The Best American Short Plays Her work is also published by University of Tampa Press, Grove Press, Vintage Books, Applause Books, Avon, Smith and Kraus, Broadway Play Publishing, and Playscripts.

Dan O'Brien's play The Cherry Sisters Revisited will premier at Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival in 2010, with original music by Michael Friedman. His new play The Three Christs of Ypsilanti was workshopped in the Easton New Plays Series at the Playwrights' Center in 2009, directed by Michael John Garcés. Dan was recently the Hodder Fellow playwright-in-residence at Princeton, as well as the inaugural Djerassi Fellow in Playwriting at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, comedienne Jessica St. Clair.

Dan's play The House in Hydesville (PlayLabs '07) had its world premier at Geva Theatre Center in January '09, directed by Skip Greer. Previous productions include The Voyage of the Carcass off-Broadway with Tony winner Dan Fogler at SoHo Playhouse, directed by Randy Baruh and produced by Stage 13, of which Dan O'Brien is a founding member. Previous productions of Dan's work include The Dear Boy at Second Stage Theatre (directed by Michael John Garcés), Moving Picture at Williamstown Theatre Festival (Darko Tresnjak), Key West at Geva Theatre Center (Skip Greer), Am Lit at Ensemble Studio Theatre's Marathon of One Act Plays (Kevin Confoy), The Voyage of the Carcass with P. 73 Productions at HERE Arts Center (Alyse Rothman), the short play Her First Screen Test at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Lamarck at Perishable Theatre, California Repertory Company, and Pittsburgh Repertory Theatre.

His plays have been developed at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, PlayLabs at the Playwrights' Center, New Harmony Project, Soho Theatre London, Roundabout Theatre Company, American Conservatory Theatre, Atlantic Theater Company, New York Theatre Workshop, Primary Stages, Magic Theatre, Black Dahlia Theatre Company, The Play Company, Rattlestick, Lark Theatre, Lincoln Center Directors' Lab, and Manhattan Theatre Club, where he was a playwriting fellow-in-residence. He has received playwriting commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Geva Theatre Center, Trinity Repertory Company; and residencies and fellowships from Yaddo, O'Neill Playwrights Conference, New Harmony Project, Sewanee the University of the South, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation.

Awards include the Osborn Award by the American Theatre Critics Association; the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award, the National Student Playwriting Award, and the National AIDS Award for Playwriting (Kennedy Center / ACTF). His work has been published by Samuel French, Dramatic Publishing, and Playscripts Inc., and in numerous anthologies and journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation and Blackbird. 

Dan also writes poetry and short fiction: his work has been published in the anthology 25 And Under / Fiction (Doubletake / W.W. Norton), and literary journals including Crab Orchard Review, Greensboro Review, StoryQuarterly, Quarterly West, Bellevue Literary Review, Louisville Review, Salt Hill, Iodine, and The Pinch. 

Dan is a Core Writer of the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. He has taught playwriting at Princeton University, SUNY Purchase, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Brown University, Primary Stages, Gotham Writers' Workshop, and in his own private workshop in New York City. In 2002-03, and again in 2005, he was the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence at Sewanee the University of the South. He holds a B.A. in English & Theatre from Middlebury College, and a Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting & Fiction from Brown University.

Kira Obolensky’s new plays include Raskol, an adaptation of Crime and Punishment, with an improvisational jazz score by The Fantastic Merlins. Commissioned by Ten Thousand Things Theatre as the winner of a national contest, the play will premiere in a Minneapolis prison in April 2009. A play for objects and actors, Cabinet of Wonders: An Impossible History, will open in Philadelphia, September 2009. Produced by Gas and Electric Arts, the play is a Pew Theatre Initiative Commission and will feature objects by artist Irve Dell. Her new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (for adults!) will premiere at the Guthrie Theatre Jaunary 2011, a commission from the Acting Company. Other new plays include Modern House (finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize) and Lune, pronounced loony, commissioned and produced by the B Street Theatre, with thanks to the NEA and Irvine Foundation. Her story, “Snow Man,” commissioned by Open Eye Figure Theatre was adapted by the theatre into a puppet play for adults and children and opened this January in their space in Minneapolis.

Kira has worked collaboratively with choreographers and visual artists and is co-founder of The Gymnasium, a consortium of nationally known artists and scientists and innovators involved in the incubation of new work and ideas. Force/Matter, created by The Gymnasium, was recently produced by Shawn McConneloug and her Orchestra at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. 

Her short puppet and film piece, poor little poor girl, premieried at Flat Works, produced by Open Eye Figure Theatre in fall of 2004. And her play Quick Silver, which premiered as a play for puppets and actors in Minneapolis, was produced by 3Legged Race and The Playwrights’ Center. Named by Twin Cities Critics as the “most outstanding experimental theatre event of 2003,” it was presented in Prague, June 2006, where it was lauded for its script and visual landscape, and was subsequently produced by Gas and Electric Arts in Philadelphia. Other plays include Lobster Alice (Kesselring Prize, finalist for Susan Smith Blackburn, published in Best Plays by American Women 2000, and produced in Atlanta, California, Texas, Minneapolis, Off Broadway, and Los Angeles, with Noah Wylie as Salvador Dali); The Adventures of Herculina, (Honorable Mention Kesselring Prize, Edith Oliver Award, produced in Chicago and in Minneapolis). Other plays include Pleasure Cruise, commissioned by the Guthrie Theatre and published in Best 10 Minute Plays of 2002-03; Collective Nightmare, commissioned by the McCarter Theatre and A New House, or 21 Lies for Four Characters. She is a recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Bush Foundation fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Jim Henson Foundation grants, a Jerome Fellowship and a McKnight Advancement Grant.

Kira is a graduate of Williams College and the Juilliard School’s Playwriting Fellowship Program and recently received her MFA in Fiction Writing from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. She is also a published author (The Not-So-Big House,co-author; Garage: Reinventing the Place We Park; and Good House/Cheap House.)

JOHN OLIVE is a widely produced and award winning playwright, a novelist, a screenwriter and a popular teacher of creative writing.

His plays include: STANDING ON MY KNEES, MINNESOTA MOON, THE VOICE OF THE PRAIRIE, EVELYN & THE POLKA KING, KILLERS, THE SUMMER MOON, THE ECSTASY OF ST. THERESA, CARELESS LOVE, and many others. Producing theaters include: the Manhattan Theatre Club, Old Globe, Steppenwolf, Wisdom Bridge, South Coast Rep, Aley Theater, the Guthrie, Actors Theatre Of Louisville, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, ACT/Seattle, and many others.

Lately John has written many plays for young audiences, both adaptations and originals: SIDEWAYS STORIES FROM WAYSIDE SCHOOL, JOHNNY TREMAIN, JASON & THE GOLDEN FLEECE, THE MAGIC BICYCLE, PHARAOH SERKET AND THE LOST STONE OF FIRE, WATER BABIES, among others. These plays have been widely produced, at Seattle Childrens Theatre, First Stage Milwaukee, Stage One Louisville, Oregon Children’s, the Arden Theatre, People’s Light and Theatre Co., Dallas Children’s Theatre, Main Street Theatre, and others.

Awards include: Jerome Fellowship, McKnight Fellowships, National Endowment For The Arts Fellowship, Bush Fellowships, Society of Midland Authors Award For Drama (STANDING ON MY KNEES), Kennedy Center Award For New Plays (THE SUMMER MOON), Rockefeller Residency (Wisdom Bridge). John has writen screen and teleplays for: Disney, Amblin Entertainmet, ShadowCatcher Entertainment, Yorktown Productions, Lorimar Television, among others. He has developed material at the O’Neill, Sundance, New Harmony Project, PlayLabs, etc. John has two prose projects going: a YA novel called Smartass and a nonfiction book about bedtime stories, Tell Me A Story In The Dark. Currently, John teaches screenwriting at the University of Minnesota.

He lives in Minneapolis with his wife Mary and their son Michael.

His website is: http://johnolive.net

A former McKnight Fellow, Dominic was awarded his second Jerome Fellowship last year, and was commissioned by Berkeley Repertory Theatre,Nautilus Music-Theater, Teatro del Pueblo, BVT Children’s Theatre, The Red Eye Collaboration, and Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. He is a co-creator of Fissures(lost & found) which will have its premiere at the 2010 Humana Festival of New American Plays.

In New York, he has worked with New York Theatre Workshop, HERE, the Samuel Beckett on Theatre Row (off-broadway), and the New York International Fringe, among others. Regionally, the Guthrie Theater (commission), The Jungle Theater, The Aurora Theatre Company, Crowded Fire Theater, Kitchen Dog Theater (multi-year), Stage Left Theater, the National New Play Network, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (multi-year). Internationally, the Tokyo Festival for the Arts, the Prague International Fringe, The Edinburgh Fringe and the Pasinger/Fabrik Theater in Munich. He is a four-time Fellow to the MacDowell Colony and a founding producer of the Workhaus Playwrights’ Collective, company-in-residence at The Playwrights’ Center.

Other residencies include Yaddo, The Edward Albee Foundation (multi-year), Ucross, The Djerassi Resident Artists Program, The William Inge Center for the Arts, and The Atlantic Center for the Arts (a residency with Paula Vogel). Published: Nevermore and The Flow, Playscripts, inc; Dramatics Magazine (multi-year), San Francisco Magazine (multi-year). He is a Core Writer and Board member of The Playwrights' Center.

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.

Before graduating from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, Victoria Stewart was a professional stage-manager, working with David Rabe, Anne Bogart and Peter Sellars among others. Her play Hardball was recently named a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and she has received the Francesca Primus Award, the Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, Ucross/Sundance, Donmar Warehouse and Hedgebrook residencies, the Norman Felton fellowship as well as the Jerome Fellowship.

Victoria is the 2008-09 recipient of a McKnight Advancement Grant at the Playwrights’ Center. Her work has been performed and developed at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, South Coast Rep, SPF, Seattle Repertory Theater, Urban Stages, Live Girls Productions, Stage Left, Hourglass Group, Circle X, Vineyard Theatre, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, Pittsburgh Public Theater, Jungle Theater, Commonweal Theater Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Page 73, Overlap Productions, and the Guthrie Theater. She is a member of the Workhaus Collective and the Vinegar Tom Players. She also played bass in an 80s cover band and her signature song was "You Spin Me Right Round (Like a Record)"

David Wiener’s plays include Guts, La Arana, Love Song of the Apocalypse, Blood Orange, in vitro, Huera, Cassiopeia, Baltimore Star, and System Wonderland. His work has been developed and produced by the Cherry Lane, the Blue Heron Arts Center, the Etcetera Theater (UK), HB Studios, the Atlantic Theater, the Almeida Theater (UK), the New Group, A Contemporary Theater, the Berkshire Theater Festival and SoHo Rep. David has received the Reynolds Price Award for Drama, the Cherry Lane Fellowship, the Rossetti Fellowship, the Lark Theater Fellowship and commissions from Atlantic Theater Company, South Coast Repertory, SoHo Rep, and A Contemporary Theater. His plays are published by Dramatists Play Service and Smith & Krauss.

Rhiana Yazzie is a Navajo playwright based in Minnesota. She is a Playwrights' Center Core Member and is commissioned by the Ashland Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater to write a play for American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle.

In the 2008/09 seasons, Rhiana will see the production of four new plays in the Twin Cities: RAINBOW CROW, a commission by Stepping Stone Theatre for Youth Development in Saint Paul; LAS MADRES commissioned by Teatro del Pueblo for their 2009 Political Theatre Festival; RED INK, a commission by Mixed Blood Theatre; and ADY, a commission by Pangea World Theatre. Rhiana received a 2008 Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Expressive Arts grant to develop ADY and it was a 2009 SPF finalist. Her next production is a Theatre for Young Audiences story commissioned by the La Jolla Playhouse that will tour in February of 2010.

Though originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Rhiana relocated to Minnesota from Los Angeles after receiving a Playwrights' Center Jerome Fellowship in 2006. She is also an award winning writer of plays for radio and for youth. Recently she was invited to workshop and present her play WILD HORSES at the biennial Bonderman National Theatre for Youth Symposium at Indiana Repertory Theatre in March 2009. I n 2006 she was invited to The Kennedy Center's New Visions/New Voices theatre for young audiences residency.

She is the three time winner of the Native Radio Theatre annual new play contest; her TYA radio play THE BEST PLACE TO GROW PUMPKINS received an Honorable Mention at the ImagiNative Film Festival in Toronto for Best Radio. An appreciated voice in her community writing about the contemporary Native American experience, she was honored by "First Americans in the Arts" in Los Angeles, California, with an award for Outstanding Achievement in Writing in 2007.

A few of her other plays include ASDZANI SHASH: THE WOMAN WHO TURNED INTO A BEAR (finalist in the 2005 Bay Area Playwrights Festival; 1st annual Two Worlds Festival of Native American Theatre, 2008); THE LONG FLIGHT (translated into Spanish and presented at the 30th World Congress of the International Theatre Institute - UNESCO in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico; and a 2002 finalist for the Princess Grace Playwriting Award); THIS LAND HAD SEEN WAR BEFORE was published in a 2008 anthology, BIRTHED FROM SCORCHED HEARTS: WOMEN RESPOND TO WAR, edited by MariJo Moore that includes contributions from Amy Goodman, Paula Gunn Allen, and Matilde Urrutia.

Rhiana is also very active as a radio/audio theatre writer and director. In May of 2008, Rhiana directed and coordinated, BOOZHOO AND WASTE YAHI FROM MINNEAPOLIS, A NATIVE RADIO THEATRE VARIETY SHOW, which brought together over 20 regional Native artists on a nationally distributed radio program produced by Native American Public Telecommunications (Boozhoo and Waste Yahi are Ojibwe and Dakota words for hello, both tribes are indigenous to Minnesota). Rhiana was a co-host of KFAI's WomenSpeak and a frequent guest host of KFAI's Indian Uprising, a community affairs program targeted to the Twin Cities Native American and broader community. She is now a co-host of First Nations Radio that airs Sunday nights at 7pm (CST) on KFAI.

Some of Rhiana's plays are available published online in university libraries across the country through Alexander Street Press.

This year, Karen Zacarías has five world premieres:, the sold-out Chasing George Washington: A White House Adventure at the Kennedy Center, the hit The Book Club Play at Round House Theater & later the Berkshire Summer Festival and Looking for Roberto Clemente at Imagination Stage. Her adaptation of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents will open next season for Round House, and her play on Voltaire & Emilie du Chatelet, Legacy Of Light will premiere at Arena Stage with Molly Smith directing. This season also has East/West Coast Premieres of Mariela in the Desert.

Karen is the winner of the 2006 Francesca Primus Award for her play, Mariela in the Desert (World Premiere at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago). Mariela is also the winner the 2005 TCG/AT&T First Stages Award, the 2004 National Latino Playwrights’ Competition, finalist for the 2004 Susan Smith Blackburn prize. Her play The Book Club Play was part of the O’Neill Playwrights Conference in 2007. Her play, The Sins of Sor Juana won Outstanding New Play at the 2000 Helen Hayes Awards and has been produced throughout the country. Karen is a core member of the Playwrights’ Center.

Her musical plays (with composer Debbie Wicks La Puma) for young people have enjoyed productions at The Goodman Theater, The Coterie, Chicago PlayWorks, Nashville Children’s Theater, The Alliance Theatre, Imagination Stage, Arden Theater, Cleveland Playhouse, Honolulu Theater for Youth, St. Louis Rep and more. The plays include Einstein Is a Dummy, Ferdinand: The Bull, the mariachi-inspired The Magical Piñata, and salsa/hip-hop Cinderella Eats Rice And Beans: A Salsa Musical.

Karen Zacarías is the founding artistic director of Young Playwrights’ Theater, an award-winning non-profit dedicated to enhancing literacy, arts empowerment and conflict resolution through playwriting in Washington, DC area schools.

Karen Z lives in D.C. with her husband Rett, and children Nico, Kati, and Maia.