JAMI BRANDLI’s plays include Technicolor Life, S.O.E., M-Theory, ¡SOLDADERA!, Sisters Three, Through the Eye of a Needle, O: A Rhapsody in Divorce, and BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!) which was named in the 2014 Kilroys List. As a 2019 Humanitas Prize PLAY LA, she wrote her play, Visiting Hours. Her work has been produced/developed at New Dramatists, New York Theatre Workshop, Launch Pad, The Women’s Voices Theater Festival, Chalk REP, Great Plains Theatre Conference, The Lark, among other venues.
BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!) nominated for Best Playwriting for an Original Play; Los Angeles Ovation Awards. 2019 Humanitas Prize PLAY LA playwright. Winner of John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award, Holland New Voices Award, Ashland New Plays Festival and Aurora Theatre Company's GAP Prize. Finalist for the 2016 PEN Literary Award for Drama, Playwrights’ Center Core Writer Fellowship, Princess Grace Award and the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference; nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award. Her short works are published with TCG, DPC and Smith & Kraus. Technicolor Life premiered as part of the 2015 Women’s Voices Theater Festival and received its Australian premiere in 2017. In 2018, BLISS (or Emily Post is Dead!) received a joint-world premiere with Moxie Theatre, and Promethean Theatre, and Moving Arts at Atwater Village Theatre (LA Times Critic’s Choice and Ovation Recommended). BLISS received its fourth production at Defunkt Theatre in March, 2020. Through the Eye of a Needle (Stage Raw ‘TOP TEN’ Pick and Ovation Recommended) received its world premiere at The Road Theatre, March-May 2018. She is currently a member of the 2020 Under Construction playwright cohort at The Road Theatre where she is working on her next play, The Caregiver’s Guide. A proud member of The Playwrights Union and The Dramatist Guild, Jami teaches dramatic writing at Lesley University's low-residency MFA program. She is represented by the Samara Harris and MSW Media Management. WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA http://www.jamibrandli.com/ FB: https://www.facebook.com/jamibrandli/ TW: https://twitter.com/jamibr IG: https://www.instagram.com/jamibrandli MORE ABOUT ME The way I overcome disappointment and rejection is to simply place my butt in my chair and write. WHAT I'M WORKING ON The Caregiver's Guide KEYWORDS female leads, dramedy Amy Drake, playwright/dramatist. The Kilroys List 2020, Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive 2020, Yale Writers’ Workshop, member of the League of Professional Theatre Women, member of The Theater Makers Studio, former Ambassador for the Dramatists Guild of America, former Board member of the International Centre for Women Playwrights. SAINT UNDER GLASS received a Julia’s Reading Room reading from The League of Professional Theatre Women. Her play, SOMEWHERE I CAN SCREAM was selected for Off-Broadway residency at The Players Theater. Appeared in the regional Emmy-winning episode of Columbus Neighborhoods: Clintonville. Her one-act play EYES LIKE OPAQUE GEMS won Most Popular Play in the MITF Short Play Lab. Best Director award from Theatre Roundtable Columbus for Evelyn Williams’ NIGHT MUST FALL. Public and conference speaker. Author. M.S. Marketing and Communications, Franklin University. M.A. Liberal studies/English, Ohio Dominican University. Education includes writing workshops in the Cambridge University International Program, Reed Hall, Paris, and playwriting at Kenyon (College) Summer Institute.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA https://www.amydrake.com/ FB: https://www.facebook.com/amy.drake3 TW: @amydrake1018 MORE ABOUT ME I keep doing theater because I enjoy telling stories and get a thrill watching them come alive on the stage. I believe live theater will come back after the pandemic passes and I keep writing and studying theater to be ready with new and refined material when it does. WHAT I'M WORKING ON After a recent Julia's Reading Room Zoom reading of my play SAINT UNDER GLASS I am busy rewriting passages with an eye toward future staging. I am also writing the libretto to a chamber piece on Emily Dickinson. KEYWORDS Historical. Current events. Drama. Comedy. Shari Albert grew up in Philadelphia and graduated NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a major in Theatre. Her first career was that of an accomplished actor with decades of experience in film and TV, as well as on the stages of NY and LA. Among her favorite roles are a lead in the Brother’s Mc Mullen that won the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and singing on stage at the Chatelet Theatre in Paris, France. Shari was lucky to have earned a living for years talking into a microphone selling everything from toothpaste to tampons.
However, telling others’ stories wasn’t enough for her and she realized she wanted to create what was being told. She has since written, produced, and acted in her own web series in 2014 and written and directed a short film. Shari has been a regular contributor to the LA Weekly and the Huffington Post, among many other in print and online publications. She is also a playwright and contributed a monologue in the upcoming monologue book, SHE PERSISTED to be published in 2021 by Applause, Books. Currently, her day job is writing treatments for award winning commercial campaigns. These include but are not limited to: McDonalds, Audible, Budweiser, Heinz, H&M, Ralph Lauren, and hundreds of others. She hopes to break into TV writing and has written pilots that have placed in the second round of the Austin Film Festival and The Final Draft Big Break contest. She continues to write specs and hopes to soon find representation. She writes female-driven stories with humor and heart. Her mother is thrilled she’s finally married. Shari lives in NYC with her husband and their wire haired dachshund, Dr. Watson. WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA TW: @ThatShari IG: @Shazziz MORE ABOUT ME I think the most gratifying moment I've had in the theatre was when I was seven years old. I was acting in my first play, "The Golden Goose". It was a big hit in the suburbs of Philadelphia, maybe you read the reviews (circa 1978)? The magical moment that changed my life happened after my one and only line, "Are you really stuck, Fritz?" I heard my first laugh. It became complete with a perfectly timed eye-roll and hands-on hips in a psychological gesture that said, "I'm sassy. Deal with it." Uproarious laughter. I was hooked. I think from that moment forward, I have been in search of that reaction in some way or other- even if that reaction is from myself- especially as I write a first draft. I knew at that moment, I could have a real effect on people. I could make them feel something; joy, happiness... later this became more nuanced when I began to create the stories being told. I still love it when I'm sitting in an audience or on a set and I can see and hear in real-time, the reactions my words have on people. Maybe these reactions are more complex as I became more of a mature writer but I will always love the sound of laughter from the house. That moment I discovered words have meaning and can change the chemistry of brains and hearts, resulting in visceral expression of feeling that is shared collectively with strangers, was the moment I knew ... I needed to live a creative life. WHAT I'M WORKING ON I just wrote and directed my first short film and it's currently been nominated for best short in two different festivals. I am also finishing my second pilot that I've written during the Covid quarantine. KEYWORDS Writer, Actor, Director, Comedy, Dramedy Phyllis Zimbler Miller is a Los Angeles screenwriter and published author who has turned to playwriting for her nonfiction theater project www.ThinEdgeOfTheWedge.com to combat anti-Semitism and hate.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA http://www.PhyllisZimblerMiller.com www.facebook.com/phylliszimblermillerauthor www.linkedin.com/in/phylliszimblermiller http://twitter.com/ZimblerMiller MORE ABOUT ME My favorite thing to do when I'm not writing is reading, whether for research for my writing projects or for entertainment. WHAT I'M WORKING ON Sharing my free nonfiction theater project www.ThinEdgeOfTheWedge.com with schools and organizations. KEYWORDS Holocaust, Anti-Semitism Jennifer O'Grady is a New York-based playwright and poet who began writing plays in her mid-forties while raising her two children. Her plays have been produced and developed nationally and internationally and include CHARLOTTE'S LETTERS (2020 Rising Artists Award; 1st Place Henley Rose Award; NEWvember Festival Dublin; O'Neill Semifinalist and other honors); JUGGLING WITH MR. FIELDS (2020 Southwest Theatre Productions Finalist); PARANORMAL LOVE (MTWorks Newborn Festival; NEWvember Finalist; 2019 Pandora's Box Honorable Mention; 2020 Southwest Theatre Productions Semifinalist); ELLERY (selected for The Best Women's Stage Monologue and a 2019 Bechdel Group selection); and “Persephone” (published in The Best New Ten-Minute Plays 2019). Her short plays have won ten-minute play contests and audience-choice awards and are also published in The Best New Ten-Minute Plays 2017 and 2016 and The Best New Ten-Minute Plays 2021. Her work is also included in Best Contemporary Monologues for Women 18-35, Stage It 3: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, The PlayGround Experiment's Faces of America Anthology, Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble’s Covid Monologues and other publications. Jennifer is also the author of two books of two books of poetry, WHITE (Mid-List First Series Award for Poetry) and EXCLUSIONS & LIMITATIONS (Plume Editions/MadHat Press). Her poems are taught, anthologized, set to music and featured in numerous places including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Writer's Almanac, BBC Radio 4, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and American Poetry: The Next Generation (to name a few). Born and raised in New York City, Jennifer earned a BA from Vassar, where she won awards for her writing, and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She lives just outside New York City with her husband, son and daughter, two dogs, two cats and a rabbit.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA https://www.jenniferogrady.net FB: https://www.facebook.com/jenniferogradypoet/ TW: @OGradyJennifer IG: @jogrady.writes MORE ABOUT ME When not writing or seeing plays I love hanging out with my family, walking my dogs, watching old movies, reading mystery novels and (in better times) traveling and exploring my beloved New York City, where I grew up and spent the majority of my adult years. WHAT I'M WORKING ON I'm usually juggling multiple projects, which currently include a full length about incarceration and a short play about the women of the 9th Street Show. KEYWORDS mystery, animals, biography, historical, holiday, comedy, drama, monologues, political, women Christine’s theatre work has been seen in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Mexico, Korea and the US. She co-founded the award winning Cliffhanger Productions in Toronto while writing many scripts for CBS, CTV, CBC, History and Family Channel, including acting as Story Editor on several series. In San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, she was the first artistic director of the Diez Minutos Festival where she also directed mainstage productions. She had several plays produced in Brighton, UK and her full length FOUR THIEVES VINEGAR (about the Black Death) ran three weeks in London in 2017 to four star reviews, and sold out at the Brighton Fringe in 2019. She is the winner of the Marion Thauer Brown New Audio Script Competition for 2018, her novella LEMON GOLF (MUST TRY HARDER) was first runner up in The Heritage Future Great Story Contest in California in 2019 while her monologue COUSINS won the Soundworks Short Story Contest in 2020. Her work is currently being performed on radio and online platforms in both North America and the UK. Published plays can be found on Smith Scripts and StageScripts UK.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA http://www.christinefoster.ca https://www.facebook.com/cmfosterwriter @christinefoster https://newplayexchange.org/users/5884/christine-foster MORE ABOUT ME I believe storytelling (rather than bartered sex!) is by far the the oldest profession. and from the moment I saw an am dram melodrama (complete with twirling mustache) at the age of six I was hooked on live theatre as the way to do it. When an audience and actors are present in the same space, something alchemical can and should occur. A raising of collective consciousness. However, the more we are told stories simply for profit rather than by and for our own communities, the less chance there is for self examination or empathy. We need to tell stories about who we are and why we're here in order to keep trying to understand who we are and why we're here. For me I also believe in disarming the audience with humour so they are vulnerable to absorb ideas as well as the whispers of the past and future. As Edward Bond said: "Have you been entertained? Good. But Laughter that’s not also an idea is cruel." WHAT I'M WORKING ON Two full lengths at the moment, one a thriller (about poor mental health leading to manipulation and horror) and another which is a speculative bio-piece about a famous woman. KEYWORDS Historical, thriller, mystery, comedy, dark comedy, family relationships, biography, folkloric adaptations Jake-ann Jones began her career as a performer, working with writers, composers, and directors including Fred Holland, Butch Morris, Craig Harris, Laurie Carlos, Robbie Mccauley, Greg Tate, Adrienne Kennedy, Shay Youngblood, Diana Amsterdam, Jonathan Rosenberg, Judith Jackson, and The Jones Twins, appearing at venues including the Public Theater, The Ohio Theater, Soho Rep, Aaron Davis Hall, Dixon Place, Company One, and Penumbra Theatre. She played the lead role in Bridgett Davis’ award-winning independent feature Naked Acts and appeared in Christiana Kiang Booth’s award-winning short Norma’s Lament. As a playwright her written works include Portrait of the Artist as a Soul Man Dead (Penumbra Theatre, St. Paul), Under Frank Observation (New York Theater Workshop), Magic Kingdom (New Georges/Hourglass Theater Company), and Black Bitches Brew (Company One, Aaron Davis Hall). Her play Death of a Ho was published in the Theater Communications Group (TCG) anthology PLAYS FROM THE BOOM BOX GALAXY. Most recently her play The Way I Want to be Remembered was part HonorRoll!’s SAY THEIR NAME festival. She co-wrote the Urban World/HBO Film Festival’s Grand Prize-winning screenplay SPOOK CITY with Gabriel Tolliver and was a writer/producer on his Creative Mothership series MONDO BLACK, produced by BlackPublic Media. She is the author of the Civil Rights activist, journalist and press secretary Florence L. Tate biography Sometimes Farmgirls Become Revolutionaries: Notes on Black Power, Black Politics, and the FBI, to be released Spring 2021 by Black Classic Press. She also writes for The Weekly Challenger Newspaper in St. Petersburg, FL.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA https://jakeannjones.com FB: https://www.facebook.com/jakeann.jones/ TW: @Jakeann4real MORE ABOUT ME I don't think I've ever been an 'art for art's sake' type of creator; I like to delve into issues about the human condition that confuse or bother me. WHAT I'M WORKING ON A play that discussed the dangers and possibilities of nanotechnology KEYWORDS Harlem, New York; African-American female playwrights; Black women writers; Science Fiction; Dark matter; nanotechnology; soul Author of over 70 plays (22 full-length), produced from Off-Broadway to Hollywood, London to South Africa, Mongolia to South Korea. Publishers include Samuel French, Original Works, Smith & Kraus and Applause. I most often focus on women's struggles to attain their dreams, though stories concerning the environment and social issues run a close second. My characters include inanimate objects as well as pandas, cockroaches, sparrows, bowerbirds and the like, and of course humans. Magical realism is usually threaded through and laughs find their way into the most serious of subjects. My New England roots form a lovely canvas, enlivened by passionate activism that was awakened at Antioch College. Colors are provided by two children, a husband with a background entirely different from mine, different jobs, homes in many places (topped off by years in New York City) and decades as a visual artist. I'm a lifetime member of the Dramatists Guild and a member of Manhattan Oracles, 29th Street Playwrights Cooperative, The Playwrights Circle, The League of Professional Theatre Women, The International Centre for Women Playwrights, Rebel Playhouse (board). Most of my scripts are on the New Play Exchange:https://newplayexchange.org/users/707/robin-rice
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA http://www.RobinRicePlaywright.com FB:https://www.facebook.com/RobinRiceDesigner;https://www.facebook.com/RobinRicePlaywright; https://www.facebook.com/RobinRiceLichtig/ @RobinRiceWrites MORE ABOUT ME I love collaboration. I was house manager of the Williamstown Theatre Festival in my home town during high school. Check the "love theater" box. I majored in political science in undergraduate school (check "activism" box), worked as a newspaper reporter for years (check "writer" box), then went back to school to get certified to teach art (check "visual art" box). That segued into being a full-time printmaker for decades. The circle closed when I designed the set for a large (200 people on stage) community theater group that produces a show every year to raise money for high school scholarships. I was cast as Judy Garland singing "Be a Clown" - gulp! (Notice I don't have a box named "performer" to check.) This gave me access to the script and I found it weak. So the next year (singing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" as Cindi Lauper in a boustier - yikes!) I volunteered for script committee. I went on to be a producer of this show, practically writing the entire thing myself that year. It was a hit, which gave me the chutzpah to go ahead and get an M.A. in playwriting and to move from New Jersey to New York City - the start of this rollercoaster ride. What I love about theater is how collaborative it is in the greater sense. In crafting plays I use my artistic and musical (check "music" box after raising two musician children) sensibilities a great deal. All this background collaborates on the story. And then there are the directors, actors, light and sound people, set and costume designers... Is anything in the world as collaborative as theater? WHAT I'M WORKING ON I just finished (Nov. 2020) "Phantasy," a long one-act (five women) which was inspired by Irene Fornes. I took a look at the women in my full-length "Women w/o Walls," wondering what happened to them before the longer story. Quite a ride, including a character who is the George Washington Bridge. An actor offered to host a table reading on Zoom, actors volunteered, and suddenly I'm not hating Zoom quite as much as I did. Last month Point Park University presented a play I wrote in quarantine, "Climbing the Good Walls," at Pittsburgh Playhouse (with 18 actors playing 21 parts!). In March, 2021, 29th Street Playwrights Cooperative will host a public reading of my play about the redtail hawks in NYC, "Pecking Order." This play takes a look at haves and have nots. Meanwhile, I'm going to dive back into rewrites of a very tough, autobiographical full-length, "Suki Livingston Opens Like a Parachute." KEYWORDS feminism, ecology, environment, lesbian, Jewish, family, historical, political, nature, animals, pandemic, climate, science fiction, radio plays, period, holiday, motherhood, body issues (Updated 1/17/2024) BARBARA BLATNER’s verse play No Star Shines Sharper, published by Baker’s Plays, was aired repeatedly on Christmas eve on NPR stations and acquired by New York’s Museum of TV and Radio. The award-winning Years of Sky was produced by Scripts Up! at 59E59 Theatres and read at the Great Plains Theatre Conference. Jane, Queen’s Foole was part of Centenary Stage’s 2023 Women Playwrights Series. Hamlet Leaves England appeared on the Pittsburgh New Works Mainstage. Two Sisters was read in the 2022 Inge Play Festival’s New Play Lab. Secret Places was produced by New Circle Theatre Company. Spell, a riff-in-verse on Shakespeare’s Tempest, was featured in Toronto’s Alumnae Theatre’s New Ideas Festival and as an audio play by Open Door Playhouse. Light was read at the 2020 ATHE Conference. Barbara is a poet who writes plays. New York Quarterly Books published her poetry collections, The Still Position (2010) and Living with You (2012). Poetry, fiction and reviews have appeared in Beloved on this Earth, Heliotrope, House Organ, Poetry Northwest, The New York Quarterly, Lift, Apalachee Quarterly, 13th Moon, and others. Barbara’s plays are hysterical, difficult, tragic, funny, probing, plunging. Her plays show an intensity of engagement with contemporary issues, with stories that focus on the micro-politics of relationships and expand to cultural and historical dimensions. She heightens language to conjure characters and conflict. Ms. Blatner has been a Fellow at many competitive residencies, including the Tyrone Guthrie Center, Blue Mountain Center, Banff Colony, Ragdale, Virginia Center for the Arts, Jentel Foundation and La MaMa Umbria International Playwright Retreat.
WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA http://www.BarbaraBlatner.com MORE ABOUT ME If I could bring one change to theatre, it would be to cultivate a close-up, low-tech kind of theatre in small, intimate spaces. We are isolated in our contemporary lives for many reasons. Rampant technology seems to pull us further apart. Can we return to a theatre of humans using human imagination? As humans, we want to know and love other humans. When I ride the New York subway I love looking at my fellow passengers. Just looking. Witnessing. Noticing moments of being. I want theatre to be more like this. I want perhaps theatre to happen as dramatic moments happen on the subway - spontaneous, real, intense. I want to watch more closely the small but momentous moves that make up our interactions and our daily life. I want less technology onstage and more magic. I want a beautiful piece of cloth to transform into a river; I don't want to see a river in a video onstage. I want text to be poetically charged, not quite realistic, as in ancient ritual. I don't want theatre to be regressive, but pluck from its past all the clean and clear and vibrating qualities of humans enacting stories in front of other humans revealing their deepest, most intimate selves. WHAT I'M WORKING ON A full-length play about a thirteen-year-old girl who brings home a wild black rat snake as a pet and provokes her emotionally distant, recently divorced mother. KEYWORDS Nature, animals, climate, verse, musical language, poetry, rhythm, political, universal, Jewish, history, history and the individual life, pagan, pianist-composer J.Lois Diamond’s work has been performed off-off Broadway in such theaters as Theater for the New City & The Wild Project, regionally, in Canada @ InspiraTO Theatre, @ The International Human Rights Art Festival & The William Inge Theater Festival. Her play “Growl” was produced @ The Downtown Urban Arts Festival, & Theatre Odyssey’s One Act Festival, (awarded runner up for best play). Accepted into the 2020 Valdez Theatre Conference,( rescheduled 2021).
Her play “I Feel Good!” was scheduled for production at N.Y.’s Signature Theater, 2020 as part of The DUAF Festival, cancelled due to the pandemic. She is a proud member of Honor Roll, Polaris North and The Dramatists Guild, where she recently studied with Tina Howe. jloisdiamond.com https://newplayexchange.org/users/20210/jlois-diamond WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA http://jloisdiamond.com FB: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1323124173 IG: https://www.instagram.com/sugatala/ MORE ABOUT ME I overcome the disappointment of rejection in a number of ways. A few years ago I got a rejection, which stung. I don’t even remember what it was for. I decided to submit anything anywhere, just to make myself feel like it wouldn’t stop me, that I could keep going. Much to my delight, the play I submitted as my therapy, got accepted to a festival. Another thing that has sustained me is being part of a cooperative, Polaris North. I bring work into the playwrights workshop, which helps me focus on the craft, not on outward recognition. I also have been writing plays for the 365 Women a Year Project. Every year I have at least one historical woman to write about, and often several monologues. I have research to do, writing, rewriting, and deadlines. As a result, I rarely feel like I don’t know what to write about next. Finally I have a meditation practice, which reminds me to be humble, compassionate and search for truth. I write to express the world as I see it, not to be obsessed with ego gratification. WHAT I'M WORKING ON I'm revising a play on Rita Levi Montalcini, and starting one on Vitka Kempner Kovner KEYWORDS Historical Women, Irony, Social justice, Satire, Buddhist, Social commentary, women of color, Jewish, humor, period pieces, contemporary work, comedy |
AuthorHonor Roll ! Members Profiles Project Archives
April 2024
Categories |