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Rhiana Yazzie is a Navajo playwright, [1] actor, and filmmaker. [2] She is based in the Twin Cities where she founded New Native Theater in 2009.
An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, [1] Yazzie grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. [3] According to her mother, she's been telling stories since she was a child. [4]
Yazzie attended the University of New Mexico from 1995 to 1999, earning a bachelor's degree in theater. From 2000 to 2002 she attended the University of Southern California and earned a master's degree in professional writing. She moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota for Playwrights' Center Fellowship, calling the city a "Mecca for Native arts, writing, [and] culture. [3] She was awarded the Playwrights' Center Jerome Fellowship two times, in 2006/2007 and in 2010/2011. [5] In 2009, Yazzie created New Native Theater which "produces, commissions, and devises authentic Native American stories for the stage." [6] Yazzie started NNT to connect the 100+ theaters in town and the large urban native community. As the head of one of the few Native theater companies in the United States, Yazzie has expressed that her work can be isolating. [7] However, she recognizes the importance of the NNT company in helping herself and other Natives creatively find their place in the world through classes and shows. The company has an open door policy, so Natives of all ages can work with the company. [8]
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Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002; Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the award for drama. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Sarah Ruhl is an American playwright, poet, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Eurydice (2003), The Clean House (2004), and In the Next Room (2009). She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Two of her plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play. In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Recording at the 2023 Grammy Awards.
Lydia R. Diamond is an American playwright and professor. Among her most popular plays are The Bluest Eye (2007), an adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel; Stick Fly (2008); Harriet Jacobs (2011); and Smart People (2016). Her plays have received national attention and acclaim, receiving the Lorraine Hansberry Award for Best Writing, an LA Weekly Theater Award, a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and the 2020 Horton Foote Playwriting Award from the Dramatists Guild of America.
Playwrights' Center is a non-profit theatre organization focused on both supporting playwrights and promoting new plays to production at theaters. It is located in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In October of 2020, the organization announced plans to move to a larger space in St. Paul.
Heather Raffo is a Lucille Lortel Award-winning Iraqi-American playwright and actress, best known for her leading role in the one-woman play 9 Parts of Desire.
Melanie A. Yazzie is a Navajo sculptor, painter, printmaker, and professor. She teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Kia Corthron is an American playwright, activist, television writer, and novelist. She received the 2014 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in Drama which is one of the largest prizes in the world of its kind. In 2022, her hometown newspaper named Corthron one of the region's 30 most influential people of color.
Lila Rose Kaplan is a 21st-century American playwright. She currently lives in Somerville, MA, where she was a Huntington Playwriting Fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company (2012-2014) as well as a Next Voices Playwriting Fellow with New Repertory Theatre (2015-2016).
Emily Johnson is an American dancer, writer, and choreographer of Yup'ik descent. She grew up in Sterling, Alaska, and is based in New York City. She is artistic director of her performance company, Emily Johnson/Catalyst. Johnson is a organizer for the First Nations Dialogues New York/Lenapehoking. She has worked part-time at Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore owned by author Louise Erdrich.
William S. Yellow Robe Jr. was an Assiniboine actor, author, director, educator, playwright, and poet.
Carson Kreitzer is an American playwright currently based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale University in 1991 with a B.A. in theatre and literature and an M.F.A. from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin.
Spiderwoman Theater is an Indigenous women's performance troupe that blends traditional art forms with Western theater. Named after Spider Grandmother from Hopi mythology, it is the longest running Indigenous theatre company in the United States.
Larissa FastHorse is a Native American playwright and choreographer based in Santa Monica, California. In 2023, she became the first known female Native American playwright produced on Broadway with The Thanksgiving Play at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater. That same year, she joined Arizona State University as a professor of practice in the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Department of English with long-time collaborators, Michael John Garcés and Ty Defoe. In 2024, Peter Pan: The Broadway Musical with an adapted book by FastHorse began an international tour.
Dominique Morisseau is an American playwright and actress from Detroit, Michigan. She has written more than nine plays, three of which are part of a cycle titled The Detroit Project. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.
The Thanksgiving Play is a satirical comedy written by Larissa FastHorse in 2015. The play follows a linear structure and incorporates informative moments to provide the audience with background knowledge on important events related to Native Americans. In 2017, it was recognized by the Kilroys as one of the best underproduced plays by a female playwright. The play made its off-Broadway debut in 2018. In 2023, the play debuted on Broadway.
Janet Allard is an American playwright and theatre educator. Allard was born and raised in Hawaii. She currently teaches in the Theatre Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Allard's plays have been produced at The Guthrie Lab, The Kennedy Center, Mixed Blood Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Repertory Theatre, The Yale Cabaret, The Women's Project and Productions, Perseverance Theatre, The House Of Candles, and Access Theater in New York City, as well as internationally in Ireland, England, Greece, and New Zealand. She has twice been awarded a Jerome Fellowship by The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis and has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and a Fulbright Fellow.
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.
Martha Boesing is an American theater director and playwright. She was the founding artistic director of the Minneapolis experimental feminist theater collective At the Foot of the Mountain.
Nikkole Salter is an American actress, playwright, and advocate known for her work on the Obie Award-winning and Pulitzer Prize nominated play In the Continuum. Salter co-wrote and co-starred in In the Continuum with Danai Gurira. The success of In the Continuum prompted Salter to co-launch The Continuum Project with Glenn Gordon NSangou. The Continuum Project is a non-profit organization that "provides innovative cultural programming for the unification, enrichment and empowerment of the global African Diaspora." As a playwright, Salter has written seven full-length plays. Salter's plays have been produced Off-Broadway and in five countries around the world. As an actress, Salter has performed Off-Broadway and at many regional theaters including Arena Stage, Huntington Theater, Berkley Repertory Theater, and the Shakespeare Theater Company.
Martyna Majok is a Polish-born American playwright who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Cost of Living. She emigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in New Jersey. Majok studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and Juilliard School. Her plays are often politically engaged, feature dark humor, and experiment with structure and time.