My work in theatre has followed a crooked mile and so has my personal bio.  Perhaps a random accounting of some influences and experiences will form a picture of me.  I was born in farm and cattle country, to parents who ran a small-town newspaper. I studied theatre and journalism in college and made a run at a master’s degree in playwriting.  I was on the founding board of a regional public radio station and eventually worked for many years as a newspaper journalist and as an arts producer for a PBS affiliate (producing interviews with Tom Stoppard, Ying Ruocheng and others).  I created press materials for Washington DC museums and a national historic preservation nonprofit. I have lived in Northern California, Washington, D.C., Florida, and Kansas.  I now live on Cape Cod, Massachusetts (it’s that arm of land curling out into the ocean).  I find it to be a deeply inspirational place, with a robust theatre scene.  I have opportunities to write, direct and perform for a variety of theatres, in a variety of genres, from musical theatre to straight drama to improv to cabaret.  I am completing my Dramatists Guild Certificate in Dramatic Writing and am grateful to the DG faculty for their generous guidance, including: working with Andrea Lepcio for initial drafts of “Endpapers” (soon to be published by Next Stage Press); working with Chisa Hutchinson via Plays In Progress for drafts of “The Revelation of James Hampton”; and further developing my lyric writing with John Dietrich. In Summer 2019, I was one of only ten playwrights to work with playwright Sarah Ruhl, at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Did I mention that Edward Albee saw me in “Seascape” years ago, and he did not run screaming from the room?  Ok, that’s probably enough about me.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.jobrisbanecreates.com
FB: Jo Hull Brisbane
TW:@JoBrisbane
IG: @jo.brisbane

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My most gratifying moment in theater is always the new discovery based on my research, or witnessing a great play written by another. Pulling together the big idea with earth-shifting moments past and present is gratifying to me as a playwright, a director, an actor. For example, seeing (even just reading) great works like Sarah Ruhl's "Eurydice" or Julie Taymor's film version of "Titus Andronicus" -- those are profound theatre experiences. I feel most like myself when sipping delicious coffee and beginning the keystrokes for another project. I love the process and never expect prizes, so there is no disappointment to overcome. Onward always. The one change I would bring to theatre is that it would move away from its fractured state of labels that purport to be inclusive but are really exclusive. I want artistic directors to know that I love to dance a whole lot of dances in my writing, and that I especially love to dance with fellow theatre makers, as in collaboration. Nobody knows that I was Julie London in another life and that singing her old tunes is one of my favorite things to do when I am not writing. I keep doing theatre because it spoke to me when I was in first grade. I am hoping the plagues will pass and I will just continue to write new stories while we are all in the chasm.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I am writing lyrics for an original musical based on my character of Hope Henderson.  Also considering making my tragi-comedy about Phyllis Schlafly (killer of the ERA) into a musical.

KEYWORDS
Feminism, Satire, Musical, Fable/folktales, Religion as Oppression, Freedom from Religion, Spoof, Fabulist, Holidays

Playwright and Lyricist Dana Leslie Goldstein has won the New England New Play Competition, Harold and Mimi Steinberg Playwriting Prize, Different Voices New Play Award, ACTF New Play Award, Henry Hoyns Poetry Fellowship, AWP Intro Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize and numerous development grants.  Her work been seen at Manhattan Theatre Club, Cherry Lane, Culture Project, Julia Miles Theater (Women’s Project), The York, Theatre80, Theater for the New City, New Dramatists, Center Stage, BMI, Vineyard Playhouse, Pulse, Theater Row Theatre, Gene Frankel Theatre, The Barrow Group, Acorn Theatre, The Lark, Beckett Theatre, Neighborhood Playhouse, The Workshop Theater, Torn Page, Nuyorican Poets Café, Estrogenius Festival, Brave New World Rep, Players Club of Swarthmore (PA), Clamour Theatre (FL), Pacific Theatre (Vancouver), TischAsia (Singapore), NYMF, on Ellis and Liberty Islands, at the U.N. and on Equity TYA tours.  

Dana’s full-length play DAUGHTERS of the SEXUAL REVOLUTION is in development for television.  Her play GO DOWN, MOSES was just selected for both Brave New World Rep’s Brave New Works Festival (March, 2021) and the PCS New Play Festival in Pennsylvania (Summer, 2021).  Monologues from several of Dana’s plays will be published by Applause Books in the anthology “She Persisted” (due in 2021).  

Dana is a librettist in the BMI/Lehmann Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, and a playwright member of The Workshop Theater.  She has been a member of the Playwrights Lab at Women’s Project, NewShoe & the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation Emerging Playwrights Lab.  Dana holds MFA degrees in both Playwriting and Poetry, each of which were funded by full writing fellowships.  Dana is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild.  For more information, please visit www.danalesliegoldstein.com.  Agent: Michael Moore, (212) 221-0400,  [email protected] 

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.danalesliegoldstein.com
FB: www.facebook.com/danalesliegoldstein
IG: @shadowlass18

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The most gratifying moment for me as an audience member is when I recognize my own emotional experience on stage.  The most gratifying moment for me as a writer is when an audience member feels that I've told their story.  I love that connection between the work and the viewer.  It's something I seek out and something I strive for.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
My play "Go Down, Moses" will be in two upcoming new play festivals, and I continue to revise it toward production.  I'm also working on a new musical adaptation of Debbie Macomber's "A Girl's Guide to Moving On".  Two of my short plays ("Natural" and "The God Part") are being turned into short films.  And I'm adapting my play "Daughters of the Sexual Revolution" into a pilot for television.

KEYWORDS
Jewish, Political, Historical, Feminist, Dramedy, Family Disfunction, Musical

(Updated 6/13/22) VICTORIA Z. DALY is an Emmy Award-winner whose plays include Doppelgänger, Sam, Demeter and Polly, Shell Collection, Invisible, Far North, On the Cross Bronx, Circling the Globe, Raw, Final Rest, High Water Line, Bottom of the Order and What to Do About It (#AfterTheBans.) They have been developed/produced at venues including the Actors Studio, Valdez Theatre Conference, ATHE Conference, Short+Sweet Festivals (Hollywood, Dubai, Perth,) Vspyshka Theatre (Russia, ) SupersoundScotland Radio, Alliance for Jewish Theatre, Berrie Center, KPBX-FM (NPR,) and the Edinburgh Festival. Recent awards: Regional Emmy (producer/story editor,) 3 Seconds in October: The Shooting of Andy Lopez (PBS); “9 Most Memorable Plays of Last 9 Years,” Warner International Playwrights Festival, Connecticut (Final Rest); Neem Award, Russia (High Water Line); Winner, Impossible Fest, Chicago (High Water Line); Best Play, Short+Sweet Dubai (On the Cross Bronx); Winner, Grand Theatre Playwriting Competition, Georgia (Final Rest.) She is a Faculty Member in the Plays in Progress program at the Dramatists Guild Institute, where she works with members to develop their new plays, and also consults privately. Raw and Other Short Plays, a collection of 7 of her plays, is published by Next Stage Press. Other plays and monologues are published by Applause Books, including in HR!’s two She Persisted anthologies; The New Short Play Festival (Amazon); Valdez Theatre Conference; MonologueBank; and some scripts. Vicki is Founder/Director of the 9th Floor writers/actors collaborative, NYC. She has taught playwriting for Stephen Sondheim's Young Playwrights; the Fly Arts Center; Litchfield Performing Arts; Playmaking; and The Write Stuff!. As a television producer/script consultant/executive, she worked for Lifetime Cable, Warner Brothers, and ABC. National journalism: Glamour, Health, Portfolio, etc. Education: MFA, Dramatic Writing, NYU; Certificat, Theatre, L’Ecole Jacques Lecoq; A.B, and M.B.A, Harvard. 

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://victoriazdaly.com
FB: Victoria Z. Daly
TW: @vzdaly
IG: @vzdaly

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What was your most gratifying moment in the theater? It's an ongoing "is" rather than a "was." 1) Any moment in rehearsal or production in which I thrill to understand that the director/actors/designers have not only understood the intention of my play but have made it better/funnier/more heartfelt/more theatrical than I'd envisioned. I have immense gratitude for incredible collaborators. 2) Any moment in which an audience member tells me how much my play has gone straight to their heart, or how much it resonated afterwards. Aren't 1) and 2) why we do this: to connect with other humans? What play or production changed your life? The month I turned 16, I saw Marcel Marceau perform in Paris. A friendless high-schooler, I had seen many Broadway musicals but was in no way a theater geek. As I sat in the audience at that performance, however, an unexpected thought came: “I want to return here and study with him.” 5 1/2 years later, I moved to Paris to study physical theater -- not with Marceau but with Jacques Lecoq. Instead of whiteface mime as most people think of it, Lecoq’s conception of "mime" turned out to be a larger idea of the infinite possibility of theater itself. He instructed us to create our own, new forms. The drive and directness, bigness, physicality, theatricality, playfulness; the unlimited nature of what theater can be that I learned at Lecoq’s still color what I write now. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t sat in Marceau’s audience so many years ago and, to my surprise, thought, “I want to go there and do that."

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
A full-length play, Shell Collection, about three sisters who have two days to divide up their late mother's possessions, sell her Florida condo and spread her ashes over the Gulf of Mexico. The process doesn't go well, especially because the dead mother keeps showing up to tell one of the sisters that she does NOT want to be buried at the beach. A play about the persistence of family roles long into adulthood; grief; and whether it really pays to hold on to the family silver.

KEYWORDS
Magical Realism, Character-Driven, Comedy, Dramedy, Theatricality, Absurdity, Physical Theater, Climate, Political, Impossible Plays, Satire, Women, Family Dysfunction, Abuse

Diana Burbano, a Colombian immigrant, is a  playwright, an Equity actor, and a teaching artist at South Coast Repertory and Breath of Fire Latina Theatre Ensemble.

Diana’s play Ghosts of Bogota, won the Nu Voices festival at Actors Theatre of Charlotte in 2019. Ghosts was commissioned and debuted at Alter Theater in the Bay Area in Feb 2020. Sapience, was a Playground-SF 2020, Winner and was featured at Latinx Theatre Festival, San Diego Rep 2020. Fabulous Monsters, a Kilroys selection was to premiere at Playwrights Arena in 2020 (postponed).

Other plays:
Policarpa, Oregon Shakespeare Festival Brown Swan lab 2017, Drama League Rough Draft series May 2017, Honorable Mention, Jane Chambers Award 2017, Parsnip Ship 2017.

Picture me Rollin 35th William Inge Festival, Inkfest/2cents, Silueta, (about Ana Mendieta), with Tom and Chris Shelton, Listen to the play at play4keeps.org/play/silueta/

Caliban’s Island (TYA) 2017 Headwaters New Play Festival at Creede Repertory.(Published by YouthPLAYS).

The short piece Linda was written for the 365 Women a Year project and has been featured in more that 20 festivals over the last year, including Center Theatre Group’s community library series.

Diana recently played Amalia in Jose Cruz Gonzales' American Mariachi at South Coast Repertory and Arizona Theatre Company, and Marisela in La Ruta at Artists Repertory. You can also see her as Viv the Punk in the cult musical Isle of Lesbos.

She was in Center Theatre Group’s 2018-19 Writers Workshop cohort and is in the Geffen’s Writers Lab in 20-21. She has worked on projects with South Coast Repertory, Artists Repertory Theatre, Breath of Fire Latina Theatre Ensemble and Center Theatre Group and Livermore Shakespeare Festival.

She is the current Dramatists Guild Rep for Southern California. www.dianaburbano.com

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://dianaburbano.com/index.html
FB: diana.burbano
TW: @loladiana
IG: @ladianaburbano

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I am a Colombian immigrant writer. I approach my work from both my worlds; as an American, because I was raised here, as a Colombian because that is my heritage. However, I don’t feel like I fully belong in either place. it would be easy to pigeonhole me as a writer of Magical Realism, but that is a label I am not eager to embrace. My work is closer to nightmare magic science fiction. My plays feature strong female protagonists and antagonists, and I world build from a feminine, Latinx, punk POV.
I am a self-taught playwright. I have learning disabilities. I have been fortunate enough to work closely with playwright peers at Center Theatre Group, the Drama League, Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Dramaturgia Mexicana. I have a thirst for learning and working with writers, who work from an entirely different point of view.

I come at writing not from an academic world, but from the trenches of the acting community. That isn’t unusual for Latinx writers. For Female Latinx writers, it is, in fact, the norm. I started writing for myself, but soon discovered that my passion, what I feel moved to do as a playwright, is writing for other Latinx women. Watching in rehearsal as actresses bloom into characters where they can be powerful, unapologetic, flawed, and complex is a great joy. After readings, I can’t tell you how many times women have come to me and said, “Thank you. Thank you for giving me something exciting and challenging to act.”

I am driven to give theatrical voice to the Latinx community. I have spent so many years listening to non-Latinx writers trying to tell our stories, often getting them wrong, or reducing us to one dimensional characters. My work fills a very specific void.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
Commissions for Livermore Shakespeare Theatre and Alter Theater, as well as "Beheading Columbus" for the Geffen.

KEYWORDS
latinx, latine, BIPOC

Donna Di Novelli has a writing career that spans film, opera, music-theater, radio and stage.

Di Novelli attended the 2018 Sundance Film Festival as the co-writer of "Madeline’s Madeline", directed by Josephine Decker, chosen as one of the top ten movies of the decade by The New Yorker magazine. The film screened at the Berlinale and BAM’s CinemaFest, is distributed by Oscilloscope, and available on Amazon Prime Video. She conceived and wrote the found text piece,"The Good Swimmer" a Pop Requiem composed by Heidi Rodewald and directed by Kevin Newbury, which sold out in BAM’s Next Wave Festival, 2018 after a workshop at the Prototype Festival. She has written libretti for Paola Prestini’s "Oceanic Verses" 2012, Kennedy Center, Barbican Centre; and for the San Francisco Opera commissioned, "Heart of a Soldier" (2011) music by Grammy-nominated Christopher Theofanidis. As a lyricist, her collaborators include Oscar-winner, Rachel Portman, composer of "Little House on the Prairie", which sold out in its premiere at the Guthrie Theater and subsequently went on a National Tour. As a screenwriter, she penned the award-winning short film, "Stag" (2015) directed by Newbury and available on iTunes. She teaches playwriting and screenwriting at New York University. She has won fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, UCross, and The Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://donnadinovelli.com
FB: Donna Di Novelli
@ddinovelli

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The very first play of mine that was produced was “Crushed Tomatoes” when I was studying with Paula Vogel for my MFA at Brown University. Paula had invited adjudicators from the American College Theater Festival to attend. On opening night, Paula came to me and told me not to let my people go after the show, because the judges would like to talk to them. At the end of the play, I ran as fast as I could through the theater to the exit doors at the back of the house and stretched my arms out to bar the audience from leaving the theater. The audience was confused. The audience wanted to leave. I wouldn’t open the doors. Paula came running. Paula: What are you doing?  Me: You told me not to let my people go. Paula: I meant the CAST.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I'm working on a new short film "Nubile", proof of concept for the full-length feature of the same title; a tv pilot; and a new music-theater piece.  All collaborations.

KEYWORDS
BAM's Next Wave artist, daughter of an immigrant, playwright, screenwriter, librettist, lyricist, feminist, off-beat.

C. Denby Swanson is a graduate of HSPVA, Smith College, NTI, and the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin. She is a recipient of a Jerome Fellowship, McKnight Advancement Grant, William Inge Residency, and a participant in the NEA/TCG National Theater Residency Program for Playwrights, and her work has been featured at PlayLabs, JAW West, EST's First Light Festival, Austin New Play Festival, and the Alley Theater's All New Festival. She has been on the faculty at UT-Austin, Cornell College, Southwestern University, and Texas State University.  Her work is published by Smith & Kraus, Heinemann, Dramatists Play Service, and Playscripts.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
TW: @cdenbyswanson

MORE ABOUT ME
Frontera@Hyde Park Theater, with Vicky Boone as Artistic Director, changed my life. Her productions of Phyllis Nagy's play WELDON RISING and Naomi Iizuka's POLAROID STORIES blew my mind and resuscitated my spirit - they were that combination of vision, collaboration, radical generosity, and intense dramaturgy. Also, the philosophy of the company was to say "yes" - to audiences, relationships, new work, challenging ideas, and profound insight. 

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
Finishing up a draft of my EST/Sloan commission, NUTSHELL; finishing a draft of my first book, a memoir about being a foster parent; heading into a rewrite on a dark rom-com about happiness; and starting a new play about paleontology and faith.

KEYWORDS
Smart-Ass, Texan, Quirky, Dark Comedy, Wry Humor, Family Commentary, Science

Marjorie Bicknell is a working playwright, director and actress. She holds a BA in Theatre and English Literature from Mundelein College in Chicago and an MA in Speech with a concentration in Theatre/Oral Interpretation/Film from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Marjorie has studied playwriting at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, Open Stage of Harrisburg, the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, where she was a member of that theatre’s Playwrights Circle, PlayPenn and the Dramatists Guild Institute. She was part of the Kennedy Center Summer Playwriting Intensive in June of 2019 and currently studies at Primary Stages and with playwright Jeffrey Sweet.

Her first full-length play, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was produced at Theatre Center Chicago by Pary Production Company. The production was the recipient of three Joseph Jefferson Citations. Marjorie is also the author of The Family Room, winner of the 2003 Pennsylvania Playwright Award, and nominated for the Weissburger Prize by Open Stage of Harrisburg, and The Boys Club, a winner of the 2012 TNT POPS! national new play contest as well as a PlayPenn semi-finalist, and a finalist with Scrap Mettle (2015), HRC Showcase (2015) and CSC Women Playwright Series at the Centenary Stage Company (2016). Marjorie’s short plays have been produced at theatres and colleges across the country. Most recently her plays Dora’s Dynamic Dates and A Date with Jesus were produced at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her 10-minute play, Another Conversation is published by Dramatic Publishing in the anthology, As She Likes It.

Marjorie is the Philadelphia Regional Rep for the Dramatists Guild, President Emeritus of the Philadelphia Dramatists Center, and founder of Playwrights Alliance of Pennsylvania (PAPA).

Honor Roll Note: R.I.P. 10-09-2023

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.bicknellcreative.com
https://www.facebook.com/marjorie.bicknell.3
https://twitter.com/BicknellCreativ

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What play or production changed my life?*
There were three. The first was a high school production of "The Student Prince" which I saw when I was six years old. I had already imagined myself on television or maybe in the movies. But I was struck with a bolt of lightning when I realized that theater could be done right in the same room where I was sitting.  I wanted to see that play again and again.  More than that, I wanted to be one of the people on that stage. The second was seeing the Peter Brook production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1970. I was gobsmacked by its theatricality and it's originality and in the way it made the Bard's work come alive like nothing else I'd ever scene. Now I wanted to make theater like that! I've been striving towards that goal ever since. Third: in 1981, I was managing a theatre company, Pary Production Company and was asked to write an adaptation of "Frankenstein". I was unwilling, but the playwright we commissioned dropped out, and I was a copywriter and available. I took on the job and was absolutely flattened to discover I could do it.  The show was a hit, won three Jeff Awards, and was responsible for the Committee adding a "new work" category to the following season's list of awards. I'm still striving to get on stage, thrill like Peter Brook and write more plays like "Frankenstein."

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I am currently working on a play full-length play called "The Author". It's a multi-generational family story that deals with plagiarism, deferred dreams, parental pressure and the right to choose your own destiny. I am also revising a dystopian play based on our experience in the Trump era but set in the near future, and a comedy about succeeding as a playwright.

KEYWORDS
Adaptation, futuristic, comedy, female centric, parts for older women, satire, horror, dystopian

Jenny Lyn Bader is a playwright living in New York City. Her recent productions include the virtual shows My First Time (Voting Writes/Luna Stage Co.) and  Guru of Touch (Edinburgh Fringe) and the solo play Equally Divine (Theater at the 14th St. Y). Her other plays include Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library (Luna Stage), In Flight (Turn to Flesh Productions/Workshop Theatre), and None of the Above (New Georges). One-acts include Worldness (Humana Festival of New American Plays), Miss America (NY Int’l Fringe Festival/”Best of Fringe” selection) and Beta Testing (Symphony Space). Her play cycles are The Age of Trump (La Jolla Theatre Ensemble), Out of Mind (NYU/Strasberg), and Emotionally Correct (Center Stage NY). Jenny Lyn co-founded Theatre 167, winner of the NY Innovative Theatre Foundation’s Caffè Cino Award. A Harvard graduate, she has received the “Best Documentary One-Woman Show” Award (United Solo Festival); Athena Writes Fellowship; Randall Wreghitt Award (Theatre Resources Unlimited); Lark Playwriting Fellowship (nominated by Wendy Wasserstein); and the O’Neill Center’s Edith Oliver Award for a playwright who has, in the spirit of the late New Yorker critic, “a caustic wit that deflates the ego but does not unduly damage the human spirit.” For This Is Not a Theatre Company, she wrote International Local: 7 (Subway Plays app); co-authored Café Play (Cornelia St. Café); and co-wrote Play in Your Bathtub: An Immersive Audio Spa. Her work has been published by Dramatists Play Service, Smith & Kraus, Applause, Vintage, W.W. Norton, The Lincoln Center Theater Review, Plays International & Europe magazine, and The New York Times, where she served as a frequent contributor to the "Week in Review.”  She belongs to the Dramatists Guild, the Authors Guild, the League of Professional Theatre Women, and Honor Roll.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.jennylynbader.com
TW: @JennyLynBader
IG: jennylynstagram

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I used to believe that the core of theatre is the collective audience experience in a shared room, but in pandemic times I have come to believe that theatre is the art of making the impossible possible. I am working on audio plays and site-specific zoom plays and outdoor plays. In the "before times" my most gratifying moment in theatre was when audiences of wide-ranging political views all responded to my play Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library. I wondered if perhaps this play could help bridge divides and offer common ground. I believe that storytelling can help save us, whether we are in a room together or around a virtual campfire, if we can find the right stories to tell or just tell them right.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
Upcoming productions include: Switch, an audio comedy designed to change your relationship to stress (produced by Anya Layfield/Beyond Immersive); Strange Happenings in the School Library (co-authored with Martine Sainvil), a zoom play for young actors; and Secret Story, a solo audio piece (This Is Not a Theatre Company). Works-in-progress include: The Invitation to Damon, a comedy about the extremes people go to in order to avoid extremists; Makeover Artist, a comedy about the side door admissions scandal; The Slippers of Alexander the Great, a comedy about a museum of fakes and forgeries; and Natives, based on a science fiction story.

KEYWORDS
Comedy, Drama, Historical, Adaptations, Solo work, Collaborations, Politics, Inclusion, Identity, Jewish, Fables/folktales, Immersive, site-specific, satire, biography, fantasy, science fiction, audio plays, verse plays, musicals, period, Young Audiences, farce, holiday

As composer/lyricist, Amy made her Off-Broadway debut with the sold-out run of BASTARD JONES at the cell theatre, a nominee for the Off-Broadway Alliance's Best New Musical and a Richard Rodgers Award finalist. Other credits include lyrics for TESLA, TRIPTYCH (book/music/lyrics) for the New York Transit Museum's Platform Series, lyrics/vocal arrangements for commissioned adaptations of Carl Sagan's CONTACT with Hungarian rocker Peter Sipos (2009 Puget Sound Theater Award – Best New Play) and NICHOLAS NICKLEBY with electric violinist Eyvind Kang and music/lyrics for A COMEDY OF ERAS at ACT Seattle with the Flying Karamazov Brothers. Incidental music credits include MOTHER, MAY I at Baltimore’s Strand (dir. Rain Pryor). Amy was librettist/creative consultant for the PBS concert special Call Me Irresponsible (2011 Telly Award, Best Original Programming) starring Ashley Brown (Broadway’s Mary Poppins).

Amy co-created TUNE IN TIME, New York City’s Musical Theater Game Show, which ran for 3 seasons at the York (“The BMI writers workshop on steroids...musical theater, cerebral fun and games pushed to 11… a joyous, hilarious romp”). She received the Burman Award for Songwriting from the Manhattan Association of Cabarets (MAC) and was a resident composer at the Nautilus Composer/Librettist Studio in Los Angeles. In 2020, Amy was awarded a spot at the National Winter Playwrights Retreat to develop IMPACT, a one-Amy show about the legacy of Pan Am Flight 103.

From 1998-2011, she was the sole female voice/writer/arranger for Grammy®-nominated vocal "band without instruments," The Bobs, recorded 4 CDs and toured extensively with the band from Lincoln Center’s American Songbook to Northwest Folklife to the Pori (Finland) Jazz Festival.

A graduate of Syracuse University (Musical Theatre) and Berklee College of Music (Songwriting/Arranging), Amy is a proud member of SAG/AFTRA, The Dramatists Guild and ASCAP, and the only honorary female member of the Vienna Boys Choir. 

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.amyengelhardt.com
FB: IAREMusic
TW: @iaretweeting, IG: @amyengelhardt

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Jersey Girl, bicoastal in normal times, lover of cheese, garlic, cats, bad puns and the NYTimes crossword. Trained as a classical/theatre performer. Love to collaborate. I've got 99 ideas... and a few are really bad. :)

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
Producing IMPACT - a solo one-act about global connection, including 3 original songs but not a musical

KEYWORDS
musicals, comedy, hybrids, new wine in old bottles

Hilary Bluestein-Lyons is a playwright, librettist, screenwriter, TV writer, stand-up comedian, comedy improviser, director, teacher, and actor. Originally from Los Angeles, she lived in Tucson, AZ for many years, where she was actively involved with Old Pueblo Playwrights and was a member of the comedy improv troupe, Not Burnt Out Just Unscrewed. She recently completed her MFA in Writing for Stage and Screen at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. Since graduating, she’s been an active participant in the Rochester Fringe Festival and has had several one-acts produced.

Her plays often have a recurring theme of female empowerment, and she’s deduced that there are an infinite number of ways stories that inspire female empowerment can be told, and need to be told until women are equal. And they’re not. We can especially see it in the disparity of the number of plays that are produced that are about women and/or written by women.

Several of her plays are about the struggles women have faced historically. From these plays we can see how far we’ve come, and also how far we still need to go. When half our population is deemed less worthy, it’s a significant issue. This has inspired Hilary to write, Tighten Your Borscht Belt, an O’Neill Semi Finalist about a 1950s Jewish stand-up comedian with the Catskills, If I Knew the Way, about two female 1980s Deadheads and the dire effects of mandatory minimum sentencing, which was specifically harsh on people of color and transwomen, and her most recent play, HisStory, a dystopian play about a future where only women exist. She draws her inspiration and sense of humor from her six kids, two feisty kittens, a Yorkie and nine chickens.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
http://www.hilarybluesteinlyons.com
FB: https://www.facebook.com/hilarybluesteinlyonswriter
TW, IG: @hilobeans

MORE ABOUT ME
It wasn't until a recently that I learned that not everyone thinks in scenes. I am constantly watching a movie, or sometimes multiple movies, of my thoughts. Apparently not everyone thinks this way. But, it was inevitable that I'd discover that my only outlet for this type of thinking is to write these scenes down. I write, because I have to. There is no shortage of ideas. Often I'll hear a snippet of a story, and that sparks an outpouring of scenes in my head. I fill in the blanks, and walla, I have a play. Well, of course it's never that simple, but you get my drift.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
Right now I'm working on two musicals, one about a Beatles tribute band and another about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I'm also doing creative visualization in order to get a TV writing job.

KEYWORDS
Queer, Jewish, Historical, Musical, Comedy, Dystopian, Feminist, Dark Comedy, Female Lead, Immersive/site-specific, fantasy, magical realism