Angelo Parra is an American playwright. He was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx, New York City. After graduating from Fordham University, his career included work as a reporter/photographer, public relations professional, politician, free-lance writer, and PR and journalism teacher at New York University before turning to theatre in 1986. His first produced play, Casino, was presented at T. Schreiber Studio, and won a 1989 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Playwriting and an Arts International grant.
Terrence McNally was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Described as "the bard of American theater" and "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced," McNally was the recipient of five Tony Awards. He won the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime, and received the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996, and he also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States. His other accolades included an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards.
Robert Frederic Schenkkan Jr. is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1992 for his play The Kentucky Cycle and his play All the Way earned the 2014 Tony Award for Best Play. He has three Emmy nominations and one WGA Award.
Peter Parnell is an American Broadway and Off-Broadway playwright, television writer, and children's book author. Parnell is also Vice-President of the Dramatists Guild of America, the professional association of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists.
John Guare is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
Robert Patrick was an American playwright, poet, lyricist, short story writer, and novelist.
Steven Dietz is an American playwright, theatre director, and teacher. Called "the most ubiquitous American playwright whose name you may never have heard", Dietz has long been one of America's most prolific and widely produced playwrights. In 2019, Dietz was again named one of the 20 most-produced playwrights in America.
J. T. Rogers is an American playwright who lives in New York.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is a Nicaraguan American playwright, screenwriter, and comic book writer best known for his work for Marvel Comics and for the television series Glee, Big Love, Riverdale, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin. He is Chief Creative Officer of Archie Comics.
Bill Bowers is an American mime artist and actor based in New York City. As an actor, mime and educator, Bill has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. He is a Movement for Actors Instructor at NYU Tisch School for the Arts and also teaches at the William Esper Studio and the Stella Adler Studio in NYC.
Stephen Adly Guirgis is an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and actor. He is a member and a former co-artistic director of New York City's LAByrinth Theater Company. His plays have been produced both Off-Broadway and on Broadway as well as in the UK. His play Between Riverside and Crazy won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
David Greenspan is an American actor and playwright. He is the recipient of six Obies, including an award in 2010 for Sustained Achievement.
Ken Urban is an American playwright, screenwriter, director, and musician based in New York. He is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leads the Music and Theatre Arts Program's dramatic writing program. Urban is also a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an affiliated writer at the Playwrights' Center.
Casey Childs is the Founder of Primary Stages (www.primarystages.org)],[1] a New York State non-profit, Off-Broadway theater company in New York City. Since 1984 they have produced over 175 productions of new plays, many of them world premieres and all of them New York City premieres, by such writers as Sharon Washington, David Ives, Horton Foote, Charlayne Woodard, Melissa Manchester, Jeffrey Sweet, Donald Margulies, Terrence McNally, A.R. Gurney, John Patrick Shanley, Ike Holter, Tina Howe, Charles Busch, John Henry Redwood, Romulus Linney, Lee Blessing, Michael Cristofer, Mac Wellman, Lynne Alvarez, Willie Holtzman, Athol Fugard, Theresa Rebeck, Michael Hollinger and Julia Jordan. He produced the commercial moves of David Ives’ All in the Timing and Mere Mortals and oversaw the commercial moves of Charles Busch's You Should Be So Lucky and Colin Martin's Virgins and Other Myths. He also oversaw the transfer of Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate, which moved to the Booth Theatre on Broadway in association with Lincoln Center Theater. In 2013 in partnership with the New York Yankees, Primary Stages developed Bronx Bombers which played on Broadway at Circle in the Square. Primary Stages was the first theater to produce Conor McPherson work in the United States with St. Nicholas starring Brian Cox. He conceived, commissioned and directed the commercial Off-Broadway show Woman Before a Glass by Lanie Robertson about Peggy Guggenheim with Mercedes Ruehl which ran for seven months at the Promenade Theatre. Other plays he directed for Primary Stages include The Morini Strad by Willie Holtzman, Barefoot Boy With Shoes On by Edwin Sanchez, Bargains by Jack Heifner, Brutality of Fact by Keith Reddin, The Preservation Society by William S. Leavengood, Elsa/Edgar by Bob Kingdom, The Dolphin Position by Percy Granger, Lusting After Pipino's Wife by Sam Henry Kass, The Secret Sits in the Middle by Lisa-Maria Radano, Algerian Romance by Kres Mersky, Madam Zelena Finally Comes Clean by Ron Carlsen, Stopping the Desert by Glen Merzer, In September Woods by David Hill and Nasty Little Secrets by Lanie Robertson. Plays produced by Primary Stages have received many nominations and awards from the Obies, the Drama Desk, the Outer Critics Circle and the Audelco Awards for Excellence in Afro-American Theatre. Plays that began at Primary Stages have received multiple nominations for Tony Awards. In 2008, Primary Stages was honored for its Outstanding Body of Work by the Lucille Lortel Awards. Carnegie-Mellon University awarded Casey their Commitment to Playwrights Award in 1995. From 1982 until 1985 Casey was the Artistic Programs Director for the New Dramatists, America's oldest playwrights’ organization, where he conducted the workshops for over 75 new playwrights in developing over 300 new works. He oversaw the development of new plays by many new playwrights including August Wilson, Wendy Kesselman, John Ford Noonan, Thomas Keneally, Emily Mann, John Pielmeier, Steve Carter, Oyamo, James Yoshimora and Pedro Juan Pietre. Works developed during that time have received productions on and off Broadway and in many American regional theatres garnering Pulitzer Prizes, Tony Awards and other honors.
Betty Shamieh is an American playwright, author, screenwriter, and actor of Palestinian descent. She has written 15 plays.
Annie Baker is an American playwright and teacher who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her play The Flick. Among her works are the Shirley, Vermont plays, which take place in the fictional town of Shirley: Circle Mirror Transformation, Nocturama, Body Awareness, and The Aliens. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.
Craig Pospisil is an American playwright, musical bookwriter and filmmaker. He has written nine full-length plays and musicals, mostly comedies, and more than 40 short plays and musicals.
Rohina Malik is a British-born American playwright, actress, speaker, story teller and educator of South Asian descent. She is also the artistic director for Medina Theater Collective.
Kimball Allen is an American writer, journalist, playwright, and actor. He is the author of two autobiographical one-man plays: Secrets of a Gay Mormon Felon (2012) and Be Happy Be Mormon (2014). The latter premiered at Theatre Row in Manhattan on September 24 and 27, 2014, as part of the United Solo Theatre Festival. From 2015–2017 he hosted the recurring Triple Threat w/ Kimball Allen, a 90-minute variety talk show at The Triple Door in Seattle.
Harrison David Rivers is an American playwright. Rivers' work has won him the Relentless Award, a GLAAD Media Award, a McKnight Fellowship for Playwrights, a Jerome Foundation Many Voices Fellowship, an Emerging Artist of Color Fellowship, a Van Lier Fellowship and the New York Stage & Film's Founders Award. He is based in Saint Paul, Minnesota and is married to Christopher Bineham.
