Ayun Halliday's plays include NURSE!, FAWNBOOK, ZAMBONI GODOT and THE MERMAID'S LEGS, in addition to the hundreds of short plays she wrote and performed in as a member of the NeoFuturists in the '80s and '90s. She and her husband, Greg Kotis, are the co-founders of Theater of the Apes, under whose auspices Ayun hosts the book-based variety show Necromancers of the Public Domain and improvises bluegrass musicals with The Wayfaring Strangers. Ayun is the Chief Primatologist - and sole employee - of the long running, hand illustrated zine, THE EAST VILLAGE INKY, and author of nine books, including NO TOUCH MONKEY: AND OTHER TRAVEL LESSONS LEARNED TOO LATE and CREATIVE, NOT FAMOUS: THE SMALL POTATO MANIFESTO.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Website: https://www.ayunhalliday.com/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/AyunHalliday/
TW: @ayunhalliday
IG: @ayun_halliday

MORE ABOUT ME
I feel most like myself when I am dancing to 70s summer hits while volunteering at the New York Common Pantry, or sitting in the Conservatory Garden writing to my 8-year-old penpal, or admiring the packaging in Chinatown markets, or saying 70 minutes worth of lines while looking the audience directly in the eye, wearing a man's 9XL black t-shirt on my head as a wimple.
If I could bring one change to the theater, it would be lower ticket prices (which I suppose would require a major overhaul of how theaters are funded, since making it ain't cheap!) And every play would have some element of humor in it.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
A graphic novel adaptation of NURSE!, a solo play about Juliet's Nurse that I wrote so as to have a project I could perform all over the English-speaking world for the rest of my days.

KEYWORDS
​Adaptations, Immersive, Solo, Comedy, Direct Address, Clown, Puppets

Kim Bixler is a playwright, author, songwriter and public speaker from Southern California. In addition to her musicals, plays and monologues, Kim has authored and edited several books, including her latest: Growing Up in a Frank Lloyd Wright House. She is a sought-after lecturer and speaker in the field of architecture and has done dozens of talks and presentations in schools, libraries and for professional organizations. Kim graduated from Cornell University and received her MFA from NYU Tisch’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Website: http://www.kimbixler.com
IG:@bixlerbixler
Additional website: http://www.barbamusical.com

MORE ABOUT ME
After a 30-year gap year, I went back to school to get my MFA at NYU Tisch's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Attending school as a mature student was both daunting and exhilarating. Drawing on decades of life experience helped shape my work and my process.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
BARBA: Brazilian Body Percussion Musical and a musical about Frank Lloyd Wright. Two ends of the musical spectrum, but similar in focus; I'm captivated by true stories and remarkable people.

KEYWORDS
​Living my best Midlife Musical Theater Crisis

Heidi is a theater artist dedicated to creating new work and discovering new approaches to classical literature and theater. Heidi’s play “Murder Girl” will receive its world premiere in the 2024 season at Forward Theater in Madison, Wisconsin after workshops at Forward Theater, Third Avenue Playhouse, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Red Caravan and The Playwriting Collective. Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival commissioned Heidi to adapt the novel “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” by Agatha Christie, which received its world premiere in their 2024 season after workshops in its summer development program. Heidi’s solo show “Scarecrow” received its world premiere in the summer of 2022 at Dorset Theatre Festival directed by Dina Janis and made its midwest premiere in Next Act Theatre’s 2024 season directed by Laura Gordon. “Mrs. Christie” received its west coast premiere at Theatreworks Silicon Valley in the fall of 2023, after receiving its world premiere at Dorset Theatre Festival in 2019. Both productions were directed by Giovanna Sardelli after developmental workshops at Primary Stages. “Mrs. Christie” was also developed at residencies at The Orchard Project in 2016 and 2018. “Dairyland” was premiered at Playmakers Rep in the fall of 2019 under the direction of Vivienne Benesch after being workshopped at Playhouse on Park, Primary Stages ESPADrills, The Lark, Red Fern Theater, Luna Stage, and was selected as the New Play Workshop at The Chautauqua Theater Festival in 2014, directed by Lisa Rothe. Heidi was a member of Space on Ryder Farm’s Working Farm and a member of the 2021-2022 cohort of I73 at Page 73. As an actress, Heidi has extensive theater, film, and TV credits. MFA from ACT in San Francisco. Heidi splits her time between Brooklyn and Milwaukee. She lives with her partner Greg and their cats Martin and Daisy.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Website: http://heidiarmbruster.com
FB: heidiarmbruster
TW: heidiarmbruster
IG: heidiarmbruster

MORE ABOUT ME
I love murder mysteries, the State of Wisconsin, and the art and chaos of a dysfunctional chosen family. My plays pinball through these themes and landscapes, but my litmus test for writing characters, building worlds, and making plays is always: Would I want to be in this? Would I want to design this? Would I want to sit through this? I believe wholeheartedly in artistic citizenship and feel that a play should serve and heal its community of artists and audience. As a result, my plays rely on language, theatricality, and offer robust roles for actors, especially women, and women "of a certain age." I claim to be a member of "the church of compassionate curiosity." My belief in curiosity is the driving force behind my writing. I write plays to answer the questions that arise in my own life, and I continue to write plays in hopes that they reach across the footlights with compassion, kindness, and empathy to offer the beginnings of a conversation with the audience. I came of age as an artist acting on regional stages around the country and grew to love and appreciate audiences. I want to make plays that provide multiple points of entry for audiences, that don’t speak down to or alienate audience members, but instead provide access to conversations, ideas, themes, and feelings that audiences may choose to engage with while having an enjoyable night out at the theater.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I'm starting a commission for Next Act Theater for the World Premiere Wisconsin initiative about the Ringling Brothers and the birth of the circus in Wisconsin.

KEYWORDS
​Buddhist, Hindu, Family, Children, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, Political ,Nature, Animals, Food, People of Color, Equality, Pandemic, Climate, Environmental, Historical, Adaptations, Fable/folktales, Immersive/site- specific, satire, biography, fantasy, science fiction, radio plays, verse, musical, horrors, period, Young Audiences, farce, holiday

(Photo by Cat Gwynn) Deanne Stillman is a widely published, critically acclaimed writer and playwright. Her books of literary nonfiction include Twentynine Palms, which Hunter Thompson called 'A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer'; Mustang, an LA Times 'best book of the year," now in audio with Frances Fisher, Anjelica Huston, and Wendie Malick; Desert Reckoning, based on a Rolling Stone piece, a Southwest Book of the Year, and winner of the Spur Award; Blood Brothers which received a starred review in Kirkus, and her latest, American Confidential, which was cited in Air Mail Weekly for its 'dazzling and evocative prose.' Her short film, "Marilyn Monroe Flees Her Crypt When Hugh Hefner Is Buried Next Door, has been winning prizes on the indy circuit, including Best Experimental Short at the Dec 2022 Indie X Festival. It's adapted from her play, "On Such a Winter's Day," which also includes other monologues for women that have been produced in festivals around the country, from Brooklyn to Topanga Canyon. Her play, "Reflections in a D'Back's Eye, was produced at Highways in Santa Monica in a short run, directed by Darrell Larson, just before the pandemic. A monologue from it appears in Best Men's Stage Monologues (2021, Smith and Kraus). It was a 2019 semi-finalist for the Blues Ink Playwriting Award from American Blues Theater. Her play, "Billy the Kid and Lee Harvey Oswald Praise Citizenship in the American Dreamtime," also produced by Highways and directed by Darrell Larson, is now streaming in vimeo. Her essays have appeared in publications such as lithub, Crime Reads, Journal of the Plague Years, the UK Independent, LA Review of Books (former columnist), and the NY Times. and she's a founding professor of the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program, where she taught for 13 years.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Website: http://deannestillman.com/
FB: Deanne Stillman
TW: @deannestillman2
IG: @realdeannestillman

MORE ABOUT ME
As I often tell friends, "I brake for the sand." That means the desert or the beach - places where I set much of my work, especially the desert. This is not really a choice but something I'm drawn to. To me, the personal is not just political; it's geographic and spiritual as well. Place is a character in my work and sometimes a driver of story, and this applies to my plays and nonfiction. So this brings me to my most gratifying moment in theatre; it involved my play, where the abovementioned "Reflections in a D'Back's Eye" is set. In this play, the Grand Canyon and baseball converge, with a baseball diamond etched onto the canyon floor, and the little girl in the play (based on a real character), who was on her local Little League team at the time of the shooting and dreamed of playing professionally when she grew up, hits the ball outta the canyon (ballpark). A baseball stadium and the Grand Canyon are two of my favorite places, for real and metaphorically, and it was most satisfying to see that this staging worked and how imaginative and magical it could be, providing what I call "grace in the carnage" for this very unsettling story. Plus the characters, from the 9-year-old little girl to a 70-year-old Wal-Mart greeter to the oldest tree in Tucson - a mesquite that sings a duet with its caretaker - really conveyed what I was hoping they conveyed: a longing for connection, and I'm not talking about networking. The play is one of the things I'm most proud of ever writing, and I based it on a prose poem of mine which you can read here. Thanks in advance for taking a look, and if you ever have a chance to get to the Grand Canyon, take it! https://gwarlingo.com/2012/on-the-anniversary-of-the-tucson-shooting-a-new-work-by-deanne-stillman/

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
A book about the last mountain lions of Los Angeles, called Ghost Cats. By the way, in my abovementioned short film about Marilyn Monroe fleeing her crypt, she runs away with mountain lions - free at last. Also, she's heard that there are cameras on the trail, and she's longing to hear that click and have one more photo taken. Can you imagine what the scientists will think, she wonders, when they see her in their recorded images?

KEYWORDS
​Culture, Nature, Animals, Land/Place, Historical, cast-aways, war/peace, Bill of Rights/personal rights, Wild West/America, myth, wild horses/burros, rock, jazz, blues, opera

I have always been fascinated by the gray spaces where I can comprehend the incrementalism that allows bigger horrors to occur, and I want to write characters and stories that move people to take personal and collective action to make society more just and allow our planet to endure. My plays include Hysterical! (Thrown Stone Theatre Company, NY Int'l Fringe Festival, UC Davis Ground & Field Festival, Second Act New Works, published Broadway Play Publishing), The Auntie Network (Studio Theatre Tierra del Sol Staged Reading Series, Bechdel Group Finalist, SWTP Finalist, published Broadway Play Publishing), Woman’s Work (Pittsburgh New Works Reading Series, Warner International Playwrights Festival Semi-Finalist), and Reclamation (in development). I’m playwright 862 in Adam Szymkowicz' 1000+ playwright interviews series (http://aszym.blogspot.com/2016/07/i-interview-playwrights-part-862-elenna.html). As an actress I’ve recorded hundreds of radio and tv commercials, promos, and audiobooks, and my voice is in the Library of Congress for my Audible.com recording of Jennifer Crusie's Getting Rid of Bradley. Yale (BA) and Columbia (MFA). 

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
TW: @elennaselenna
​IG: @elspiration

MORE ABOUT ME
I keep "doing theater" because theatre is the medium through which I feel most connected to humanity. I love the ensemble work of rehearsal and I love the subversive feeling that connecting across the boundary of actor-audience in performance engenders. Writing my worries into existence allows me to ruminate collectively and to share the joy and beauty of being human with other human beings.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I’m currently working on a play, Reclamation, an eco-drama about the impacts of climate change, sharing THE TEMPEST's island setting, but taking place after the departure of the European colonizers. A play about what happens next, Reclamation is a reconceived masque where the audience comes to understand the play through shifting lenses: first as a Shakespeare-inspired period piece in iambic pentameter, then as a play about the present, and finally as a theatrical performance in which they are participating. And there are Elizabethan style songs.
 
KEYWORDS
Climate Justice, Feminist, Drama, Play-with-music​

Theatrical Mining Company has produced two of Susan Middaugh's full-length plays, A Modern Pas de Deux and Black Widows, for the Baltimore Playwrights Festivals. Next Stage Press has published Black Widows. 18 of her 10-minute plays have had productions by 34 theater companies in the U.S., Canada and England. They include the Source Theatre; Shelterbelt Theatre; the Arts Center, Carrboro; Onstage Atlanta; Fells Point Corner Theatre; the Magnetic Theater, Stone Soup Theatre; Barrington Stage; The Strand Theater; Shandaken Theatrical Society; the Open Hydrant Theater Company; Arena Players Theater; Short Attention Span Theater; Dorset Players; Greenbrier Valley Theatre; Lebanon Community Theatre and Wasatch Theatre Company among others. Her full length play, Feeble-Minded White Trash, was a finalist in the 2024 Waterworks Festival at Live Arts Theatre in Charlottesville, VA. She is a longtime member of the Dramatists' Guild and the New Play Exchange. Susan lives in the Baltimore suburbs.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
https://newplayexchange.org/plays/users/1616/susan-middaugh

MORE ABOUT ME
My two favorite things to do when not doing theater are singing in a chorus and hiking with the Mountain Club of Maryland. If I could bring one change to theater, it would be to encourage theaters that say they believe in diversity to produce plays about people with disabilities. I overcome disappointment by seeing other people's plays and by seeking out other submission opportunities. I keep doing theater because there are more stories that my characters want to tell.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I'm working on creating short plays about substance abuse and the impact it has had on individuals and their parents based on interviews that I conducted here in Maryland.

KEYWORDS'
​social justice, Irish Catholic, plays that reflect the society in which we live

Christine Benvenuto’s plays have been performed at Boston Theater Marathon, International Human Rights Art Festival and Sixth Festival NYC, The Braid in Los Angeles, Clamour Theater Florida, Fern Street Festival Connecticut, LAVA Center Western Massachusetts and online. A play is available as a podcast from Onstage/Offstage; another was performed by Orpheus Theatre Company, Lancaster, PA and included in the anthology Borderless Thalia, and monologues are forthcoming in the anthology Frozen Women/Flowing Thoughts from Venus Theatre and The Best Men’s Stage Monologues 2024. She is the author of two books from St. Martin’s Press, and stories and essays that appear in many newspapers, magazines and anthologies. She has been selected as a 2024 member of New Perspective Theatre’s Women’s Work cohort, NYC, and is a recipient of a 2024 grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Website: https://christinebenvenuto.wordpress.com/
FB:https://www.facebook.com/AuthorChristineBenvenuto
IG: https://instagram.com/benvenutochristine

MORE ABOUT ME
Theater is thrilling. Saw my first Broadway play in high school and was hooked as an audience member. Had my first short play produced a few years ago after decades of wanting to write for the stage, and was hooked on playwrighting. Nothing replaces the live theatrical experience shared by everyone suspended together in space and time for the duration of the play. Magic.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
Two full length and several one act plays are in progress.

KEYWORDS
​Jewish, sexual violence, domestic violence, abortion, satire, family, young audiences, absurdism, climate change, dementia, race, class, political

Lesley Lisa Greene is a playwright and composer based in Ithaca, NY. Her full-length play about abortion access, The Turnaway Play, will premiere at the Kitchen Theatre Company in May 2024. She has composed music for nine musicals for young audiences with playwright/lyricist Rachel Lampert. Lesley is co-director of Story House Ithaca, an organization that brings people together to share, study, create, and enjoy stories in all their forms. She co-founded and continues to be an organizer of Porchfest, a festival that began in Ithaca in 2007 and now takes place in more than 180 cities across North America. Lesley is also a sound designer, video editor, director, swing dance instructor, and the winner of the 2024 Debra S. Newman '02 Cornell Tradition Community Recognition Award! She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, the International Centre for Women Playwrights, and the New Play Exchange.

WEBSITE/SOCIAL MEDIA
FB: lesley.l.greene
IG: @lesleygreene1                                                

MORE ABOUT ME:
I keep doing theater because I love to collaborate on creative projects, and theater is the ultimate in creative collaboration.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I am working on a small-cast musical about a father with Alzheimer's and his daughter.