EMPOWERING DIRECTORS AND PLAYWRIGHTS
EMPOWERING DIRECTORS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

A SUMMIT FOR THEATER PRACTITIONERS ON CREATION, COLLABORATION, & COMMUNICATION

             

AGENDA

      

SPEAKERS

      

REGISTER

             

INSPIRE. MOTIVATE. IMAGINE.

A More Inclusive and Aspirational American Theater

 

SPEAKERS

May Adrales

May Adrales

May Adrales is a director, educator, arts advocate, and newly appointed Artistic Director at The Lark, an international new play laboratory. She has directed over 25 world premieres nationally, including Qui Nguyen's award-winning Vietgone at Manhattan Theatre Club, Seattle Rep, South Coast Rep, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her work can be seen at Lincoln Center, Signature Theatre, Second Stage Theatre, Milwaukee Rep, Goodman Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Portland Center Stage, Pioneer Theater, Syracuse Stage, and Cleveland Play House. She has developed musicals and plays at The Eugene O’Neil Theater Conference, NAMT, and numerous other New York and regional theaters. Awards include the TCG Alan Schneider Award, Josephine Abady Award, and Paul Green Directing award. She served as Associate Artistic Director, Director of New Play Development at Milwaukee Repertory Theater; Director of Artistic Programs, Lark Play Development Center; Artistic Associate at Playwrights’ Center and Artistic Associate at The Public. Fellowships: Drama League, NYTW, Van Lier, Denham Fellowship, TCG New Generations. Former adjunct at Yale and teacher at NYU, Juilliard, Fordham, A.C.T, Carnegie Mellon, and Brown University. She serves on the board of Theater Communications Group and is a graduate of Yale School of Drama. mayadrales.net

 

Jeremy B. Cohen

Jeremy B. Cohen

Jeremy B. Cohen is in his eleventh season as Producing Artistic Director at the Playwrights’ Center, having previously served as Associate Artistic Director/Director of New Work at Hartford Stage (2003-2010), where he also directed several premieres. He is also the Founding Artistic Director of Naked Eye Theater Company in Chicago. Other Regional/NYC directing credits include productions at: Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alley Theatre, Alliance, Baltimore Centerstage, Dorset Theatre, George Street Playhouse, Goodman, Kansas City Rep, McCarter, Mixed Blood, New Victory, Olney Theatre, Open Fist, Repertory Theatre of St Louis, Royal George, Steppenwolf Theatre, Theater J, Theater Latté Da, Victory Gardens, and Workhaus Collective; workshops at O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, New York Stage & Film, Pasadena Playhouse, Denver Center, Portland Center Stage, A.C.T./New Strands, New Harmony, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and Woolly Mammoth. As Founding Artistic Director of Naked Eye Theatre Company in Chicago, Cohen developed/directed more than 15 plays, including several premieres. He has received numerous directing awards, an NEA/TCG Directors Fellowship, and a Northwestern University grant for his play 12 Volt Heart. His Off-Broadway production (The Duke on 42nd Street) of singer/songwriter Jonatha Brooke's My Mother Has 4 Noses is currently touring the U.S., and he's currently under commission on a co-written play (with Dipika Guha), Malicious Animal Magnetism at A.C.T./ZSpace in San Francisco.

 

Kareem Fahmy

Kareem Fahmy

Kareem Fahmy is a Canadian-born playwright and director of Egyptian descent and is currently a TCG Rising Leader of Color. His plays, which include A Distinct Society, The Triumphant, Pareidolia, The In-Between, and an adaptation of the acclaimed Egyptian novel The Yacoubian Building, have been developed at the Atlantic Theatre Company, New York Stage & Film, Oregon Contemporary Theatre, Capital Repertory Theatre, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, Northlight Theatre, Target Margin Theater, The Lark, Fault Line Theater, and Noor Theater. He has directed and developed new plays at theaters around the country, including MCC, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The New Group, New Dramatists, The Civilians, Geva Theatre, Pioneer Theatre, Portland Stage, Silk Road Rising, San Diego Rep, and Berkeley Rep. Fellowships/Residencies: Sundance Theatre Lab, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Phil Killian Directing Fellow), The O’Neill (National Directors Fellow), Second Stage (Van Lier Directing Fellow), Soho Rep (Writer/Director Lab), Lincoln Center (Directors Lab), New York Theater Workshop (Emerging Artist Fellow & Usual Suspect). Kareem is co-founder of the Middle Eastern American Writers Lab at The Lark and of Maia Directors, a consulting group for organizations and artists engaging with stories from the Middle East. MFA: Columbia University. www.kareemfahmy.com

 

Miranda Haymon

Miranda Haymon

Miranda Haymon (she/they) is a Princess Grace Award/Honoraria-winning director, writer and curator. Recent projects include A Cakewalk (Garage Magazine & Gucci), Really, Really Gorgeous (The Tank), Everybody (Sarah Lawrence College), In the Penal Colony (Next Door @ NYTW, The Tank), and Mondo Tragic (National Black Theater). Miranda is a Resident Director at Roundabout Theatre Company and The Tank, a New Georges Affiliate Artist, a Usual Suspect at NYTW, a Space on Ryder Farm Creative Resident, member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, and the Wingspace Mentorship Program. Miranda has held directing fellowships at WP Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre Company, and Arena Stage. BA Wesleyan University. www.mirandahaymon.com.

 

Daniel Alexander Jones

Daniel Alexander Jones

Daniel Alexander Jones is a performance artist, writer, and director. Audiences and critics across the United States, and abroad, have acclaimed Jones’s interdisciplinary work. His performances on stage, on record, and in digital media as his alter-ego, Jomama Jones, include Radiate (Soho Rep, and national tour), Night Flowers (JACK), the albums Six Ways Home, Radiate, and Lone Star, and a series of annual online New Year’s Messages. His performance pieces and plays include Blood:Shock:Boogie, Phoenix Fabrik, Bel Canto, Cab and Lena, and The Book of Daniel. Jones is developing, both, An Integrator’s Manual (FUSEBOX, and La MaMa, etc.) and Jomama Jones: Flowering as multi-platform projects over the next two years. Daniel’s dynamic community of collaborators includes Helga Davis, Sharon Bridgforth, Jane Saks, Will Davis, Kyla Searle, Samora Pinderhughes, and Dr. Bobby Halvorson. Daniel has directed world premiere productions of pieces by Dr. E. Patrick Johnson, Erik Ehn, Shay Youngblood, and Renita Martin, among others. Daniel Alexander Jones was named a 2015 Doris Duke Artist; he received the Alpert Award in Theatre, and was a fellow at Occidental College, NYU/Hemispheric Institute, and the ESB Institute at Columbia College. Daniel was an inaugural Creative Capital Artist, and the MAP Fund, the Jerome Foundation, and McKnight Foundation, among others, have supported his work. Daniel was a Resident Playwright with New Dramatists, a Core Member of the Playwrights’ Center, and has lectured or taught at numerous colleges, universities, theatres, and arts organizations nationally. He heads the Playwriting track at Fordham University, where he is an Associate Professor of Theatre. Daniel lives in NYC. danielalexanderjones.com

 

Heather Raffo

Heather Raffo

Heather Raffo is an award-winning playwright and actress whose work has taken her from the Kennedy Center to the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar, and from the State Department to classrooms across the country and across the world.  An American with Iraqi roots, Raffo’s plays have been hailed by The New Yorker as “an example of how art can remake the world”. She is the author and performer of NOURA (Weissberger and Helen Hayes awards) which premiered in D.C. before moving to Abu Dhabi, Cairo, NYC and theaters across the nation, and 9 Parts of Desire (Lucielle Lortel award, Blackburn commendation, Helen Hayes, Drama League and Outer Critics Circle nomination) which ran Off-Broadway for nine months and has played across the U.S. and internationally for over a decade. 9 Parts of Desire was the first play in the English language to center an Iraqi protagonist and its commercial success helped birth a new genre of Middle Eastern American theater.  Raffo’s libretto for the opera FALLUJAH, the first opera about the Iraq war, was part of Kennedy Center’s International Theater Festival, received its world premiere at Long Beach Opera and opened at NYC Opera in 2016 accompanied by a documentary titled Fallujah: Art, Healing and PTSD.  Her new anthology, The Things That Can’t Be Said, was published in 2021.  It brings together Raffo’s groundbreaking contribution to the rarely examined traumas shaping cultural and national identity for both Americans and Iraqis since the events of 9/11.  

 

Rhiana Yazzi

Rhiana Yazzie

Rhiana Yazzie is a Navajo playwright, producer, director, and actor based in Minnesota. She is a two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow (2010/2011 and 2006/2007) and was a Playwrights’ Center Core Member for three years. She was a playwright in residence at the William Inge Center in Independence, Kansas, Fall 2014. She’s been co-commission by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater for American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle. Notable TYA plays include Chile Pod (La Jolla Playhouse); Wild Horses (Bonderman National Theatre for Youth Symposium and The Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices). She created New Native Theatre in 2009, a company based in the Twin Cities: a new way of looking at, thinking about, and staging Native American stories, newnativetheatre.org. She holds a Masters of Professional Writing from the University of Southern California where she produced lectures and concerts by Madeleine Albright, Herbie Hancock, Spaulding Grey, and Stephen Hawking among others.

 

Chay Yew

Chay Yew

As a playwright, Chay Yew's work has been produced at the Royal Court (London), Public Theater, Mark Taper Forum, Manhattan Theatre Club, Long Wharf, La Jolla Playhouse, Intiman Theatre, Wilma Theatre, Portland Center Stage, East West Players, Dallas Theatre Center, Cornerstone Theatre Company, Studio Theatre, Fattore K (Naples), La Mama (Melbourne), Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center (Shanghai), Four Arts (Kuala Lumpur), TheatreWorks, Singapore Repertory Theatre, Toy Factory, Checkpoint Theatre, (Singapore), amongst others. For his plays, he received the London Fringe Award for Best Play, George and Elisabeth Marton Playwriting Award, GLAAD Media Award, and Robert Chesley Award. His plays are published by Grove/Atlantic. As a director, his New York credits include the Public Theater, Playwrights Horizon, New York Theatre Workshop, Signature Theatre, Playwrights Realm, Rattlestick, Ensemble Studio Theatre, National Asian American Theatre, and Ma-Yi. Regionally, he directed for the Humana Festival, Goodman Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre, Berkeley Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, South Coast Rep, Huntington Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Rep, Woolly Mammoth, Long Wharf, Denver Theatre Center, Tanglewood, amongst others. He is a recipient of the OBIE Award for Direction. An alumnus of NewDramatists, he edited an anthology of Asian American plays, Version 3.0, for TCG Publications. From 2011 to 2020, he was the Artistic Director of Victory Gardens in Chicago. For his leadership, he was awarded the Iris Award for Outstanding Commitment to Connecting Chicago Communities and the Arts, and the Impact Award for Bold and Inclusive Artistic Leadership. chayyew.com