Christina Anderson's plays include: Hollow Roots, Good Goods, Inked Baby, and Man in Love. Her work has appeared at the A.C.T., Penumbra Theater, About Face Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Crowded Fire, and other theaters across the country. Awards and honors include Susan Smith Blackburn nomination, Lorraine Hansberry Award, Van Lier Playwrighting Fellowship, Wasserstein Prize nomination, and Lucille Lortel Fellowship. She has a B.A. from Brown University and will soon have an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. American Theatre Magazine selected Anderson as one of fifteen up-and-coming artists, "whose work will be transforming America's stages for decades to come."

Trista Baldwin is the recipient of two Jerome Fellowships (2004-2005 and 2005-2006) and a 2006-2007 McKnight Advancement Grant. Commissions include Wade the Bird (The Guthrie, published by Playscripts), Terra Australis Incognito (The Production Company), and Stu and Ray (New Georges). Her work has been developed and produced by companies including The Lark, New Georges, The Empty Space, Hypothetical Theatre Company, La Mama, HERE, Urban Stages, Synchronicity, Eternal Spiral Project, The Red Eye, Chopin Theatre, Circle X (LA), Stark Raving, Actors Theatre of Phoenix, National New Play Network, and HB Playwrights Foundation.

Recent projects include the Off-Broadway premier of Sand at Women's Project, Forgetting (developed with Workhaus Collective; Playlabs; LIU New Play Fest), American Sexy (Ruth Easton Lab; New Theatre Group), and Climbing Trees, a screenplay (Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival 2009, director Paul Moehring).

Upcoming projects include Doe 2.0 a bi-lingual, bi-cultural collaboration with Shirotama Hitsujuya (www.yubiwahotel.com), based on the play Doe, directed by Shirotama in the Tokoyo International Festival.

A native of the woods of Washington State, and sometime-New Yorker, she currently makes her home in Minneapolis, where she is a founding member of the Workhaus Collective (www.workhauscollective.ord), a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center, and mother of a three year old, Ila. Trista teaches playwrighting, screenwriting, and dramatic literature at St. Cloud State University.

Trista's work is published through Playscripts and Heinnemann.

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."

Dan Dietz’s plays include tempOdyssey, Tilt Angel, Americamisfit, and The Sandreckoner. His work has been commissioned, developed and presented at such venues as Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Guthrie Theater, the Public Theater, the Kennedy Center, Curious Theatre, NJ Rep, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Studio Theatre, the Playwrights’ Center, and Tiyatro-Z (Istanbul, Turkey). Dietz has been an NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights recipient, a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere recipient, a Josephine Bay Paul Fellow, and a James A. Michener Fellow, and has been nominated for the Weissberger Award and the ATCA Steinberg Award. Dietz has twice been a recipient of the Heideman Award.een.

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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Marcus Gardley is a poet-playwright who has won the Helen Merrill Award, Kesselring honor, Gerbode Emerging Playwright and the ASCAP Cole Porter Prize. His most recent play Every Tongue Confess (2011) had a critically acclaimed run at Arena Stage starring Phylicia Rashad and directed by Kenny Leon. It was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award. Another play, … and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, was produced at Cutting Ball Theater (2010) and was nominated for the Bay Area Theater Critics Outstanding Playwright Award. He’s had six productions including This World in a Woman’s Hands (2009), and dance of the holy ghost (2005). M.F.A., playwriting, Yale School of Drama. Member: New Dramatists. He is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Playwrighting at Brown University.

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."

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, SadGrrl13, Phosphorescence, Cipher and The Killing of Michael X. He is a co-creator of Fissures (lost and found), which was co-commissioned by Actor’s Theater of Louisville and the Playwrights’ Center and premiered at the 2010 Humana Festival. Cory is a recipient of a MAP Fund Grant and two Jerome fellowships through the Playwrights’ Center where he is a Core Member. His play Little Eyes was produced in a Workhaus Collective production at the Guthrie Theater and other plays have been produced or developed at the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, American Repertory Theatre, Williamstown Theater Festival, SPF Summer Play Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, Ars Nova, Illusion Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Salvage Vanguard, P73 Productions, Hangar Theater, and Red Eye Collective, among others. He has been commissioned twice by the Guthrie to write a play for their graduating class of B.F.A. students (Tiny Disasters and Until We See Three of Everything). He is a former MacDowell Colony fellow, a former resident at the Hermitage Artists Retreat and the Tofte Lake Center, a recipient of a Jerome Travel and Study Grant and a member playwright of the Workhaus Collective. His work is published by Heinemann, Playscripts Inc. and Dramatic Publishing. He earned his M.F.A. in Playwriting from Brown University.

Samuel D. Hunter's recent productions include: A Bright New Boise (Partial Comfort Productions, names one of New York Magazine's Top 10 Plays of 2010; upcoming production at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company), The Whale (upcoming production at the Denver Center Theater Company), Jack's Precious Moment (Page 73 Productions, 59E59), and Five Genocides (Clubbed Thumb, Ohio Theater). He has had plays developed at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the Ojai Playwrights Conference, PlayPenn, Juilliard, and elsewhere. Awards: 2011 Sky Cooper Prize, 2008-2009 PONY Fellowship, two Lincoln Center Le Compte du Nuoy Awards, others. He holds degrees in playwrighting from NYU, the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, and Juilliard.

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 a playwright, actress, 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 B.A. in English and Dramatic Arts.

Her play Love Person, a four part love story in Sanskrit, ASL and English, has been produced to critical acclaim around the country. It was developed during a Many Voices residency at the Playwrights' Center, work-shopped at the Lark Play Development Center in NY, and selected for reading at the National New Play Network (NNPN) conference 2006. Love Person was produced in a NNPN rolling world premiere at Mixed Blood Theatre (MN), Marin Theater (CA), and Phoenix Theatre (IN), in the 2007/08 season. In 2008/09 it was produced at Live Girls! Theatre in Seattle, Alley Repertory Theatre in Boise, and Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. Love Person received the Stavis Playwriting Award in 2009.

Her most recent play, Agnes Under The Big Top, a tall tale, was selected as a 2009 Distinguished New Play Development Project by the NEA New Play Development Program hosted by Arena Stage, and was developed by the Lark Play Development Center (NY), Mixed Blood Theatre (MN), InterAct Theatre (PA), the Playwrights' Center (MN), and the Rhodope International Theater Laboratory (Bulgaria). Agnes Under the Big Top premiered at Mixed Blood Theatre and Long Wharf Theatre (CT) in 2011, and will be produced at Borderlands Theater (AZ) in 2012 in a NNPN rolling world premiere.

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, The Adventures of Hanuman, King of the Monkeys, a Bollywood style musical inspired by tales from the Ramayana, and Hanuman and the Girl Prince, a play in iambic verse inspired by an episode in the Mahabharata, for SteppingStone Theatre for Youth.

She has also scripted several productions for 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.

Aditi is a Resident Artist at Mixed Blood Theatre, and a Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center.

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 play 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!, at Theater J, and the 2010 Ojai Playwrights Conference. It premiered at the Public Theater in April 2011. 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."

Marion McClinton (Lifetime Core Writer) Known for his award-winning Broadway and Off-Broadway productions of August Wilson’s work, with whom he had a long friendship and professional relationship, Marion directed Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Broadway revival), King Hedley II (Broadway premiere, regional theatres), Jitney (Off-Broadway, regional and international theatres), Gem of the Ocean (Goodman Theatre, Mark Taper Forum), Seven Guitars and Two Trains Running (CenterStage), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Missouri Repertory), Fences (Indiana Repertory Theatre, Paramount Pictures). Other directing credits include Breath Boom (Playwrights Horizons), Jar the Floor (Off-Broadway), Roar (New Group), Thunder Knocking on the Door (regional theatres), Drowning Crow (premiere, Broadway MTC), Elmina’s Kitchen (CenterStage), Yellowman (Mixed Blood/Guthrie Theater), Bulrusher (Pillsbury House) and Pure Confidence (Mixed Blood). Mr. McClinton is an Associate Artist of CenterStage. His plays include Police Boys and Stones and Bones (1994 Humana Festival). Awards include three Audelco Awards, Kesselring Prize, OBIE, NEA/TCG Pew Charitable Trust Grant, Drama Desk and Evening Standard nominations. He is an alumnus of both New Dramatists and the Playwrights’ Center.

Winter Miller’s plays include: In Darfur (The Public, TimeLine, Theater J, Horizon, Mosaic), Paternity (Cherry Lane), The Penetration Play (13P), Conspicuous (Keen Teens), Home/Away (Askew). She is developing The Arrival and the musical Amandine. In Darfur premiered at the Public and was later presented as a one-night only SRO performance at the 1,800-seat Delacorte, a first for a play by a woman. The play won the Playwrights’ Center and the Guthrie’s Two-Headed Challenge. Fellowships include Sundance Institute, Cherry Lane Mentor Project (Craig Lucas), Hedgebrook and Voice & Vision. She holds an M.F.A. from Columbia and a B.A. from Smith. Member of 13P and a New Georges affiliate.

Qui Nguyen is a co-founder and Co-Artistic Director of the OBIE Award-winning Vampire Cowboys of New York City. Some of his recent scripts include the children's play Aliens versus Cheerleaders (Keen Teens); Trial by Water (Ma-Yi Theater); and the Vampire Cowboys productions of The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G, Alice in Slasherland, and Fight Girl Battle World. His plays Bike Wreck, Soul Samurai, and Krunk Fu Battle Battle are all currently in production at Ensemble Studio Theatre in NY, InFusion Theatre in Chicago, and East West Players in Los Angeles, respectively. Along with his Core membership at the Playwrights’ Center, Qui is also a proud member of New Dramatists, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and The Ma-Yi Writers Lab.

KIRA OBOLENSKY is a playwright and writer who lives in Minneapolis. New work includes Force/Matter, with Shawn McConneloug,  The Oldest Story in the World, created collaboratively with Theatre Novi Most; Cabinet of Wonder: an impossible history (Open Eye, Minneapolis. Gas and Electric Arts, Philadelphia Barrymore best new play nomination); Raskol (commissioned and produced by Ten Thousand Things Theatre and featured on critics’ end of year lists); and Modern House, finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburne Prize. Kira is a Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships and grants from the Henson Foundation, NEA and Irvine Foundations, Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, and Jerome Foundation. She attended Williams College and Juilliard’s Playwriting Program and y completed an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing at Warren Wilson’s M.F.A. Program for Writers. She is the author of three published books about architecture and design and is the co-author of the national bestseller The Not So Big House. A Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, Kira teaches writing at Spalding University’s low residency M.F.A. program, at Goddard College's MFA Program in Interdisciplinary Arts in Vermont,  and also at the University of Minnesota.

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 Prarie, Evelyn and 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 and 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 Orlando was awarded his second Jerome Fellowship in 2009, 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 premiered 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 twelve full-length plays, the book & lyrics of one musical, and numerous one-acts. He is a past recipient of two Jerome Fellowships from the Playwrights' Center. This summer, Williamstown Theatre Festival produced the world premiere of his newest play, Samuel J. and K. Steppenwolf Young Adult will produce the Midwest premiere of the play this winter.

Also this summer, the New Theatre Group produced his one-act, A Standing Long Jump, in the Minnesota Fringe Festival.

His play The 13th of Paris premiered at Pittsburgh’s City Theatre and was the recipient of an Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award. It has since been produced by Horizon Theatre in Atlanta, The Public Theatre of Maine, The Warehouse Theatre in Greenville, South Carolina, and Seattle Public Theatre. The 13th of Paris will soon be published by Dramatic Publishing.

The Hopper Collection won San Diego Playbill's award for Best New Play and was subsequently produced at Huntington Theatre Company in Boston and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. It is published by Broadway Play Publishing and a monologue from the play appears in Smith and Kraus' Best Womens Monologues 2008.

Mat is a co-founder of Slant Theatre Project in New York City, serves on the Board of Directors for The New Harmony Project, and is an alumnus of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and Ars Nova's Play Group. He has been commissioned to write new plays by South Coast Rep and Huntington Theatre Company.

A graduate of the University of Evansville, he holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from University of California – San Diego. An avid Chicago Cubs fan, he has seen baseball games at twenty-seven of the current MLB 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. Victoria has received the Francesca Primus Award, the Helen Merrill Award, a Martha R. Ingram Fellowship, a Jerome Fellowship and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award. She's been in residence at Ucross/Sundance, Donmar Warehouse, Hermitage, Tofte Lake and Hedgebrook. Her most recent play Rich Girl has had readings at City Theater, Tennessee Rep and Broken Watch and was nominated for a Susan Smith Blackburn Award. Her plays include Hardball (Live Girls Theater, SPF), 800 Words: The Transmigration of Philip K. Dick, (Workhaus Collective, Hourglass Group, Live Girls Theater, named one of the top ten productions of 2009 by Citypages), LIVE GIRLS (Urban Stages, WHAT, Stage Left), Leitmotif (South Coast Rep, Page 73), Nightwatches (Overlap Productions), The Last Scene, and an adaptation of Henry James' The Bostonians. She was one of the collaborators on Fissures (lost and found) presented at the 2010 Humana Festival. She is now working on a screenplay for HBO about the recording industry's battle with Napster and on a collaborative piece, Kafka in Postville, with Cory Hinkle and the Wilhelm Bros. about the INS raid in Postville, IA. Her adaptation of Mercy Watson to the Rescue will premiere at the Children's Theatre in Minneapolis in the fall of 2011. She is a producing member of the Workhaus Collective, a core member of the Playwrights' Center and a member of WGA West.

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 and Kraus.

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 Chile Pod a Theatre for Young Audiences story commissioned by the La Jolla Playhouse, it toured 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 Has 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.

In 2008, Karen Zacarías had 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 played at the Round House, and her play on Voltaire & Emilie du Chatelet, Legacy Of Light premiered at Arena Stage with Molly Smith directing. 2008 also saw the 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.