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 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.
Obo Addy was a Ghanaian drummer and dancer who was one of the first native African musicians to bring the fusion of traditional folk music and Western pop music known as worldbeat to Europe and then to the Pacific Northwest of the United States in the late 1970s. He taught music at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
Carolyn Gage is an American playwright, actor, theatrical director and author. She has written nine books on lesbian theater and sixty-five plays, musicals, and one-woman shows. A lesbian feminist, her work emphasizes non-traditional roles for women and lesbian characters.
Tommy Murphy is an Australian playwright, screenwriter, adaptor and director. He created and was head writer for the 2022 TV series Significant Others. He is best known for his stage and screen adaptation of Timothy Conigrave's memoir Holding the Man. His most recent plays are a stage adaptation of Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, Mark Colvin's Kidney and Packer & Sons.
The Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) is an organization that administers arts grants in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas Counties that also do advocacy in the Portland metropolitan area in Oregon, United States. It evolved from the city’s Metropolitan Arts Commission agency in the 1990s. In 1995, the Metropolitan Arts Commission became the RACC as an independent non-profit organization.
Artists Repertory Theatre is a professional non-profit theatre located in Portland, Oregon, United States. The longest-running professional theatre company in Portland, since 1982 the company has focused on presenting the works of contemporary playwrights, including world premieres.
Antoinette Hatfield Hall, formerly known as the New Theatre Building, is a 127,000-square-foot (11,800 m2) complex located in Portland, Oregon, in the United States. It is one of three buildings in the Portland'5 Centers for the Arts, which also includes Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and Keller Auditorium. Hatfield Hall contains the Dolores Winningstad Theatre, Newmark Theatre, and Brunish Theatre. It was dedicated in honor of Antoinette Hatfield, the former First Lady of Oregon from 1959 to 1967 and the wife of former U.S. Senator and Oregon governor Mark Hatfield.
Dan O’Brien is an American playwright, poet, essayist, and librettist. His most prominent works have been the play The Body of an American and the poetry collection War Reporter. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2015–16. His play The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage was the winner of the 2018 PEN America Award for Drama.
Rob Urbinati is a freelance playwright, screenwriter, book author and theater director based in New York City. He is the Director of New Play Development at Queens Theatre.
Timothy Daly is an Australian playwright, dramaturg, and teacher, whose plays have won awards and been produced around the world since 1982.
Toni Press-Coffman is an American playwright, living and working in Tucson, Arizona. She was born and raised in New York City.
Kristoffer Díaz is an American playwright, screenwriter, and educator. As a playwright, he has five full-length titles amongst other works which have been widely produced and developed. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2011, The New York Times awarded Díaz with the Outstanding Playwright Award. He has worked with television networks like HBO, FX, Fox, ESPN, and Netflix. Díaz currently teaches at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Díaz is the Head of Admissions and an associate professor at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Diaz teaches dramatic writing and contemporary US theater. Diaz's primary focus is American plays and musicals.
Urban Hydrology is a series of twelve outdoor 2009 granite sculpture by Fernanda D'Agostino, installed along the Portland Transit Mall in Portland, Oregon, United States. The work is part of the City of Portland and Multnomah County Public Art Collection courtesy of the Regional Arts & Culture Council, which administers the work.
Lauren Yee is an American playwright.
Justin Hocking is an American essayist and writer of memoir, literary nonfiction, and short stories.
Stefanie Claire Zadravec is an American playwright. Her full-length plays include Tiny Houses, Colony Collapse, The Electric Baby, Honey Brown Eyes, and Save Me. She has won numerous awards including the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwright Award, Francesca Primus Prize, and the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play. She is a resident playwright at New Dramatists.
Emily Tess Duncan is a New Zealand playwright. She is co-founder of Prospect Park Productions, an organisation aiming “to create and produce original New Zealand theatre and collaborative projects that reach into other art forms." Duncan held the 2019 Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. She lives in Dunedin.
Andrea Stolowitz is an American playwright and university professor based in Portland, Oregon. She serves as the Ronni Lacroute Playwright in Residence at Artists Repertory Theatre, a five-year post begun in 2017. Her work has been produced nationally and internationally and she is a three time award winner of the Oregon Book Award for Drama.
Josh Wilder is an American playwright whose work has been performed regionally across the United States and is best known for The Dandelion Plays, a work-in-progress play cycle inspired by Wilder’s experience growing up in inner city Philadelphia. His play, Leftovers, won The Great Plains Theatre Conference’s Holland New Voices Playwright Award in 2014. Wilder received a B.F.A. in acting from Carnegie Mellon and an M.F.A. in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama.
A 4 foot bust of York, the only African American on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was installed in Portland, Oregon's Mount Tabor Park, in the United States, from February to July 2021. The artist stayed anonymous at first, but after the bust was removed he revealed himself as Todd McGrain. McGrain was a student of Darrell Millner, Portland State University professor of history and Black Studies. The bust appeared on February 20, replacing the statue of Harvey W. Scott, which had been toppled on October 20, 2020. McGrain did not seek city permission to install the bust, which McGrain expected to be temporary; on June 11 the city announced that it would remove the bust.
