August Wilson was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle, which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), both of which won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
The Circle Repertory Company, originally named the Circle Theater Company, was a theatre company in New York City that ran from 1969 to 1996. It was founded on July 14, 1969, in Manhattan, in a second floor loft at Broadway and 83rd Street by director Marshall W. Mason, playwright Lanford Wilson, director Rob Thirkield, and actress Tanya Berezin, all of whom were veterans of the Caffe Cino. The plan was to establish a pool of artists — actors, directors, playwrights and designers — who would work together in the creation of plays. In 1974, The New York Times critic Mel Gussow acclaimed Circle Rep as the "chief provider of new American plays."
The Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theatre is an annual, nationally-recognized award program that is sponsored by Theatre Philadelphia for professional theater productions in the Greater Philadelphia area. Each season culminates with an awards ceremony.
The Dallas Theater Center is a major regional theater in Dallas, Texas, United States. It produces classic, contemporary, and new plays and was the 2017 Tony Award recipient for Best Regional Theater.
Sheila Callaghan is a playwright and screenwriter who emerged from the RAT movement of the 1990s. She has been profiled by American Theater Magazine, "The Brooklyn Rail", Theatermania, and The Village Voice. Her work has been published in American Theatre magazine.
Philip Kan Gotanda is an American playwright and filmmaker and a third generation Japanese American. Much of his work deals with Asian American issues and experiences.
Bruce Walsh is a contemporary American playwright and a prominent Philadelphia fringe artist. His works have received attention due to their unique brand of site-specific theater. In addition to theater, he is regular contributor to Metro a free city paper in Philadelphia.
Ken Urban is an American playwright, screenwriter, and musician based in New York. Urban is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an affiliated writer at the Playwrights' Center.
Tina Landau is an American playwright and theatre director. Known for her large-scale, musical, and ensemble-driven work, Landau's productions have appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally, most extensively at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago where she is an ensemble member.
David Adjmi is an American playwright. He is the recipient of a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award, a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the inaugural Steinberg Playwright Award, a Bush Artists Fellowship, and the Kesselring Prize for Drama. In 2020, he released a memoir about the struggle to become an artist, titled Lot Six. His plays include Stunning (2008) and Stereophonic (2023), the latter winning the Tony Award for Best Play.
Penguin Rep is a nonprofit theater company in Stony Point, New York, now in its 42nd season. Penguin Rep, dubbed "the gutsiest little theatre" by the New York Times, was founded by Joe Brancato, artistic director, with the aim of adding a new kind of theatre to the local cultural landscape: a professional enterprise dedicated to promoting new voices and works which enrich the body of American drama; nurturing and developing new talent for the stage; and reaching new audiences for theatre.
Charles Gilbert Jr. is a writer, composer, director and educator who specializes in musical theater. Currently a Professor of Theater Arts in the Ira Brind School of Theater Arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Gilbert served as Director of the Brind School from 2008 to 2013 after heading its Musical Theater Program for nearly twenty years. He developed the SAVI System of Singing-Acting and has taught students using this pedagogy in workshops and residencies in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark and Germany. Among his works for the musical stage is the 1990 musical Assassins, source of the idea for Stephen Sondheim's Tony Award-winning musical of the same name.
Ain Gordon is an American playwright, theatrical director and actor based in New York City. His work frequently deals with the interstices of history, focusing on people and events which are often overlooked or marginalized in official history. His style combines elements of traditional playwrighting with aspects of performance art.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is an American playwright. His plays Gloria and Everybody were finalists for the 2016 and 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His play Appropriate made his Broadway debut as a playwright in 2023 and earned him his first Tony Award. His additional plays include An Octoroon and The Comeuppance. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016.
Migdalia Cruz is a writer of plays, musical theatre and opera in the U.S. and has been translated into Spanish, French, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish.
Audrey Cefaly is an American playwright.
Eisa Davis is an American playwright, actress and singer-songwriter. She is known for her work as the co-creator of the Warriors concept album with Lin-Manuel Miranda. Her previous works include the plays Bulrusher and Angela's Mixtape. For her stage acting in New York, she won an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance. She resides in Brooklyn.
James Ijames is an American playwright, actor, and professor originally from Bessemer City, North Carolina. He received his B.A. in Drama from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and earned his MFA in Acting from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is now based. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Villanova University and former co-artistic director of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. Ijames is a founding member of Orbiter 3, Philadelphia's first playwright producing collective. His adaptation of Hamlet, titled Fat Ham, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2022 after premiering as a "digital production" at the Wilma in 2021. A second production ran at The Public Theater during the summer of 2022, before opening on Broadway in April 2023. He is the recipient of the 2018 Whiting Award for drama and the F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Philadelphia Theatre Artist.
Michael Warren Powell was an American artistic director, director, actor and designer involved in the Off-Off-Broadway movement, Off-Broadway and in the development of new American plays.
Jacqueline Goldfinger is an American playwright and librettist best known for her award winning plays Babel and Bottle Fly. She also wrote the popular textbook, Playwriting with Purpose: A Guide and Workbook for Emerging Writers.
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