Samuel Shepard Rogers III was an American actor, playwright, author, screenwriter, and director whose career spanned half a century. He won 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most by any writer or director. He wrote 58 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. He received the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009. New York magazine described Shepard as "the greatest American playwright of his generation."
Anthony Robert Kushner is an American author, playwright, and screenwriter. Lauded for his work on stage, he is most known for his seminal work Angels in America, which earned a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. At the turn of the 21st Century he became known for his numerous film collaborations with Steven Spielberg. Kushner made his Broadway debut in 1993 with both Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. He then adapted the acclaimed 2003 miniseries directed by Mike Nichols for which Kushner received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series or Movie. He received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013.
Joseph Mantello is an American actor and director known for his work on Broadway productions of Wicked, Take Me Out, and Assassins, having gained notoriety in the 1993 cast of Angels in America.
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at College of Staten Island (CSI) and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Theresa Rebeck is an American playwright, television writer, and novelist. Her work has appeared on the Broadway and Off-Broadway stage, in film, and on television. Among her awards are the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award. In 2012, she received the Athena Film Festival Award for Excellence as a Playwright and Author of Films, Books, and Television. She is a 2009 recipient of the Alex Awards. Her works have influenced American playwrights by bringing a feminist edge in her old works.
Dixon Place is a theater organization in New York City dedicated to the development of works-in-progress from a broad range of performers and artists. It exists to serve the creative needs of artists—emerging, mid-career and established—who are creating new work in theater, dance, music, literature, puppetry, performance, variety and visual arts.
The Talking Band is an American Off-Off-Broadway theatre company specializing in experimental theatre, based in New York City, New York.
Adrienne Kennedy is an American playwright. She is best known for Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award. She won a lifetime Obie as well. In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
Rochelle Bass Owens is an American poet and playwright.
Ain Gordon is an American playwright, theatrical director and actor based in New York City. His work frequently deals with the interstices of history, focusing on people and events which are often overlooked or marginalized in "official" histories. His style combines elements of traditional playwrighting with aspects of performance art.
Kristina "Tina" Satter is an American filmmaker, playwright, and director based in York City. She is the founder and artistic director of the theater company, Half Straddle, which formed in 2008 and received an Obie Award grant in 2013. Satter won a Guggenheim in 2020. Satter was described by Ben Brantley of the New York Times as "a genre-and-gender-bending, visually exacting stage artist who has developed an ardent following among downtown aesthetes with a taste for acidic eye candy and erotic enigmas." Her work often deals with subjects of gender, sexual identity, adolescence, and sports.
Kit Yan is a queer, transgender, and Chinese-American award-winning poet. He is also a playwright and screenwriter. Yan resides in New York.
Andrew Ondrejcak is an American artist working in theater and film. He writes, directs, and designs his original performances that have been produced in the U.S. and internationally. His design work crosses into the fashion industry and has been featured in Vogue, W, and Wallpaper, among others.
Tanya Selene Saracho is a Mexican-American actress, playwright, dramaturge and screenwriter. With a background in theater before writing for television, she co-founded Teatro Luna in 2000 and was its co-artistic director for ten years. She also co-founded the Alliance of Latinx Theater Artists (ALTA) of Chicago. She is particularly known for centering the "Latina gaze". She developed and was showrunner of the Starz series Vida, which ran for three seasons (2018-2020). Saracho signed a three-year development deal with Starz in February 2018.
Mary Wiseman is an American actress. She is best known for starring as Sylvia Tilly in the Paramount+ science fiction drama series Star Trek: Discovery (2017–present).
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.
Leah Nanako Winkler is a Japanese-born American playwright currently living in New York City. Her play God Said This won the 2018 Yale Drama Series Prize. Her play Two Mile Hollow recently won the Francesca Primus Prize. She is a recipient of a 2020 Steinberg Prize in Distinguished Playwrighting.
Kyoung H. Park is a Korean-Chilean playwright. He is credited as being the first Korean from Latin America to be produced and published in the United States. Currently, Kyoung H. Park resides in Brooklyn, New York where he serves as the Artistic Director at Kyoung’s Pacific Beat, a peacemaking theater company.
Jeremy O. Harris is an American playwright, actor, and philanthropist, known for his plays "Daddy" and Slave Play. The latter received 12 nominations at the 74th Tony Awards, breaking the record previously set by the 2018 revival of Angels in America for most nominations for a non-musical play. Harris was the winner of the 2018 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, given by the Vineyard Theatre in New York City. A profile in the New York Times said that Harris's "ability to render subconscious trauma into provocative theatrical expression, as potentially unsettling as entertaining, has earned him a lot of attention in a very short time." Out called him "the queer black savior the theater world needs."
Donja R. Love is an American playwright. Originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Love identifies himself as an Afro-Queer, HIV positive playwright and filmmaker. His work has been produced in multiple states around the United States, but he is mainly based in New York City and Philadelphia. He is best known for his 2019 play one in two based on the 2017 CDC study that found that one in two black gay or bisexual men will be diagnosed with HIV at some point in their life.
