The City and Borough of Juneau, more commonly known simply as Juneau, is the capital city of the state of Alaska. Located in the Gastineau Channel and the Alaskan panhandle, it is a unified municipality and the second-largest city in the United States by area. Juneau was named the capital of Alaska in 1906, when the government of what was then the District of Alaska was moved from Sitka as dictated by the U.S. Congress in 1900. The municipality unified on July 1, 1970, when the city of Juneau merged with the city of Douglas and the surrounding Greater Juneau Borough to form the current municipality, which is larger by area than both Rhode Island and Delaware.
Playwrights Horizons is a not-for-profit Off-Broadway theater located in New York City dedicated to the support and development of contemporary American playwrights, composers, and lyricists, and to the production of their new work.
The Juneau Symphony is a semi-professional symphony orchestra located in Juneau, Alaska.
columbinus is a play written by Stephen Karam and PJ Paparelli, with contributions by Josh Barrett, Sean McNall, Karl Miller, Michael Milligan and Will Rogers, created by the United States Theatre Project. The play looks at issues of alienation, hostility and social pressure in high schools and was suggested by the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado. The play premiered in Silver Spring, Maryland in 2005 and then Off-Broadway in 2006.
Timothy Dang is an American actor and theatre director originally from Hawaii of Asian origin. He served as the artistic director at the Asian American theatre company, East West Players (EWP), in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, California until 2016. He graduated in 1980 with a bachelor of Fine Arts degree in theatre from the University of Southern California.
Richard Dauenhauer was an American poet, linguist, and translator who married into, and subsequently became an expert on, the Tlingit nation of southeastern Alaska. He was married to the Tlingit poet and scholar Nora Marks Dauenhauer. With his wife and Lydia T. Black, he won an American Book Award for Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 And 1804
Elizabeth Peratrovich was an American civil rights activist, Grand President of the Alaska Native Sisterhood, and member of the Tlingit nation who worked for equality on behalf of Alaska Natives. In the 1940s, her advocacy was credited as being instrumental in the passing of Alaska's Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, the first state or territorial anti-discrimination law enacted in the United States.
Lynn Schooler is an American novelist, nonfiction author, photographer, an outdoorsman, and Alaskan wilderness guide living in Juneau, Alaska. He wrote The Blue Bear, The Last Shot and Walking Home.
Portland Stage Company is a professional LORT theater company in the state of Maine. Founded as the Profile Theatre in 1974 as a touring theater company, the company made Portland a permanent home in 1976. In 1982, it moved to its current home of 25A Forest Ave, Portland, ME. Anita Stewart has served as the Artistic Director since 1996, and in 2006 was made Executive Director as well.
Molly Smith is an American theatre director and the artistic director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. She was formerly artistic director of the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, which she founded in 1979 and led until 1998.
WP Theater is a not-for-profit Off-Broadway theater based in New York City. It is the nation’s oldest and largest theater company dedicated to developing, producing and promoting the work of female-identified theater artists at every stage in their careers. Currently, Lisa McNulty serves as the Producing Artistic Director and Michael Sag serves as the Managing Director.
David Grimm is an American playwright and screenwriter.
Ernestine Saankaláxt Hayes belongs to the Kaagwaaataan clan, also known as the wolf house, representing the Eagle side of the Tlingit Nation. Hayes is a Tlingit author and an Emerita retired professor at the University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) in Juneau, Alaska. As an author, Hayes is a (Tlingit) memoirist, essayist, and poet. She was selected as the Alaska State Writer Laureate in 2016 and served in that position until 2018.
The American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theatre (ART/МХАТ) Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University was founded in 1987 as a training ground for the new American Theater by the Robert Brustein and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
City Theatre is a professional theater company located in Pittsburgh's South Side. It specializes in productions of new plays and has commissioned new works by playwrights on the national theatre scene, including Christopher Durang, Adam Rapp, and Jeffrey Hatcher. Established in 1975 as the City Players under the direction of Marjorie Walker, it was originally composed mainly of Carnegie Mellon graduates and was part of Pittsburgh's Department of Parks and Recreation, performing at schools, parks, and housing projects. Initially the group shared their performance space in the North Side's Allegheny Center with Pittsburgh Public Theater. In 1979, the group was offered a residency at the University of Pittsburgh and renamed itself City Theatre. “Homeless” for a brief period of time, the University of Pittsburgh theatre department offered to shelter the theater company in 1980. Attilo Favorini, head of the department, thought that, “The City Theater offered us [Pitt] the opportunity for Pitt’s students to work a professional company.”(Steele, Bruce “Artistic Struggles -The City Theater Company: A History of Bad Luck and Good Theater” pg. 27) In addition to receiving a new troupe of professional actors, arts funding through CETA enabled the expansion of the company and the creation of the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 1980. In 1981, under the artistic direction of Marc Masterson, the company moved to a new performance space on Bouquet Street in Oakland. The company again moved to a new performance space at the former Bingham United Methodist Church in the South Side in 1991, where in addition to its own season it acted as a host space for the earliest productions of the Pittsburgh New Works Festival. Marc Masterson became artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville in Kentucky, and Tracy Brigden became artistic director in 2001.
Deborah Brevoort is an American playwright, librettist and lyricist best known for her play The Women of Lockerbie. She teaches Creative Writing at several universities.
Stephen Karam is an American playwright, screenwriter and director. His plays Sons of the Prophet, a comedy-drama about a Lebanese-American family, and The Humans were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2012 and 2016, respectively. The Humans won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play, and Karam wrote and directed a film adaptation of the play, released in 2021.
Yeast Nation is a musical that premiered in 2007, with music by Mark Hollmann, lyrics by Hollmann and Greg Kotis, and book by Kotis. It serves as the first part of a musical trilogy, with the middle installment being Hollmann and Kotis' previous Tony Award-winning musical Urinetown.
Vera Starbard is an Alaska Native editor and playwright. She is a Tlingit/Denaʼaina woman born in Craig, Alaska, graduating from East Anchorage High School in Anchorage, Alaska. In 2016, she was named Playwright-in-Residence at Perseverance Theatre in Douglas, Alaska. Her residency was renewed for Cohort 3: 2019–2022. She has written several episodes of the Molly of Denali animated children’s program airing on PBS KIDS. She is the editor of the “First Alaskans” magazine. Vera is currently a staff writer for Alaska Daily.
Jacqueline Goldfinger (she/they) is an American playwright, librettist, and dramaturg who is known for her plays Bottle Fly, Babel, and Arsonist. She grew up in rural North Florida with a love of music and storytelling. Today, she is a playwright-librettist who seeks out unique collaborations, working across disciplines to create singular works of theater and opera. She works nationally and internationally on performative texts which speak to our shared humanity while honoring the nuanced identities of each character and culture.
