Lee Knowlton Blessing is an American playwright best known for his 1988 work, A Walk in the Woods. A lifelong Midwesterner, Blessing continued to work in regional theaters in and around his hometown of Minneapolis through his 40s before relocating to New York City.
Ari Roth is an American theatrical producer, playwright, director and educator. From 2014 to 2020 Roth served as the Artistic Director of Mosaic Theater Company of DC and was formerly the Artistic Director of Theater J at the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center from 1997 to 2014. Over 18 seasons at Theater J, he produced more than 129 productions and created festivals including "Locally Grown: Community Supported Art," "Voices from a Changing Middle East", and Theater J's acclaimed "Beyond The Stage" and "Artistic Director's Roundtable" series. In 2010, Roth was named as one of the Forward 50, honoring nationally prominent "men and women who are leading the American Jewish community into the 21st century, and in 2017 he was given the DC Mayor's Arts Award for Visionary Leadership. In 2021, Roth launched a new partnership with A. Lorraine Robinson, founding Voices Festival Productions, to be the new home for his long-running "Voices From a Changing Middle East Festival." Their first public event was a virtual benefit in support of "Ukrainian Playwrights Under Siege" in partnership with the Arts Club of Washington.
John Paterson is a Canadian director, devisor, dramaturg, translator, actor and theatre creator who works across Canada, the United Kingdom, and internationally. His favourite credits include directing the installation of The List (BoucheWHACKED!), the site-specific The Women of Troy and F. Garcia Lorca’s The Love of Don Perlimplin for Belisa ; production dramaturgy on the English language premiere of H. Muller’s Macbeth: nach Shakespeare; and playing Adolf Hitler and Walt Disney in The Blue Light and Scheffler in The Ugly One.
Young Playwrights' Theater (YPT) is a not-for-profit theater arts-based education organization in Northwest Washington, D.C. It provides interactive in-school and after-school programs presenting and discussing student-written work to promote community dialogue and respect for young artists.
Barbara Schneider originally from Germany, is an American playwright.
Katori Hall is an American playwright, screenwriter, producer, actress, and director from Memphis, Tennessee. Hall's best known works include the hit television series P-Valley, the Tony-nominated Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, and plays such as Hurt Village, Our Lady of Kibeho, Children of Killers, The Mountaintop, and The Hot Wing King, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Brighde Mullins is an American playwright and poet.
Tracey Scott Wilson is an American playwright, television writer, television producer, and screenwriter. She graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in English and from Temple University with an MA in English Literature.
Melanie Marnich is an American television writer-producer and playwright. She co-created and serves as executive producer and co-showrunner for the upcoming Amazon series, The Expatriates. She has written for Big Love on HBO; Her episode, “Come, Ye Saints” for Big Love, earned her a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for best drama episode. It was also named Best Television Episode of 2009 by Entertainment Weekly, rated third in TIME Magazine's list of 10 Best TV episodes of 2009, and ranked in TV Guide's 100 Best Episodes of All Time.
Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay is a Minnesota-based Lao American spoken word poet, playwright, and community activist. She was born in 1981 in a refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand. In 2020, she received a National Playwright Residency Program grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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).
PEN Center USA was a branch of PEN, an international literary and human rights organization. It was one of two PEN International Centers in the United States, the other being the PEN America in New York City. On March 1, 2018, PEN Center USA unified under the PEN America umbrella as the PEN America Los Angeles office. PEN Center USA was founded in 1943 and incorporated as a nonprofit association in 1981. Much of PEN Center USA's programming continues out of the PEN America Los Angeles office, including the Emerging Voices Fellowship, PEN In the Community writing residencies and guest speaker program, and the PEN Presents conversation series.
Jordan Harrison is an American playwright. He grew up on Bainbridge Island, Washington. His play Marjorie Prime was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Caridad Svich is a playwright, songwriter/lyricist, translator, and editor who was born in the United States to Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents.
Kristoffer Díaz is an American playwright, screenwriter, and educator. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity. The play gave him the Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Play and the New York Times Outstanding Playwright Award. In 2024 he received a nomination at the Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Musical with Alicia Keys for Off-Broadway production Hell's Kitchen.
Kit Yan is a queer, transgender, and Chinese-American award-winning poet. He also writes plays and screenplays. Yan lives in New York.
Lauren Yee is an American playwright.
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.
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.
Carlos Murillo is an American playwright, director, and professor of Puerto Rican and Colombian descent. Based in Chicago, Murillo is a professor and head of the Playwriting program at the Theatre School at DePaul University. He is best known for his play Dark Play or Stories for Boys.
