Stephen Tomac

Peter Mills

Peter wrote music and lyrics for Golden Boy of the Blue Ridge, a critically-acclaimed bluegrass adaptation of J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World set in 1930s Appalachia.

Peter received the 2010 Kleban Award for lyrics, the 2007 Fred Ebb Award for emerging songwriters, 2006 Drama Desk Award nominations for his show The Pursuit of Persephone (Best Music and Best Orchestrations), the 2003 Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and a 2002 grant from the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation.

He supplied lyrics for Iron Curtain, (book by Susan DiLallo, music by Stephen Weiner), which received the 2006 IT Award for Best Musical, was workshopped at the 2008 Eugene O’Neill Musical Theatre Conference and showcased at the 2009 NAMT Festival.

Illyria, a musical adaptation of Twelfth Night, had its regional premiere at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in Fall 2004, with a cast album released in April 2005. The show is now licensed by Theatrical Rights Worldwide. And Peter’s first full-length show, The Taxi Cabaret, was published by Samuel French in Fall 2004.

With Cara Reichel, he wrote The Flood, which was selected for the 2001 ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop. Marco Polo, written with composer Deborah Abramson, was selected for the ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop in 2000, and Peter and Deborah were chosen as 2000-01 Dramatists Guild Fellows.

As composer/lyricist, other shows include The Alchemists, Lonely Rhymes, The Rockae, and Honor.

Peter holds an M.F.A. in Musical Theater Writing from New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts and a degree in English/Dramatic Literature from Princeton University. He is a founding member of Prospect Theater Company.

Website: http://www.pcmills.com/

Jesse Kearney

Jesse recently received his Juris Doctor from New York Law School where he concentrated in Intellectual Property Law and was an associate of the Institute for Information Law and Policy. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Dean’s Award for Student Leadership. Currently, Jesse is a Post-graduate Fellow with the Racial Justice Project at New York Law School. He is also a participant of the New Lawyers Institute at The New York City Bar Association and serves on the Board of the New York Law School Alumni Association.

Jesse received his BA from Dartmouth College and his MFA from New York University in the Musical Theater Writing Program. He is a proud member of ASCAP and the Dramatist Guild. Additional awards and fellowships include the Lazarus Family Musical Theater Award, Dartmouth College Senior Fellowship, and the ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop. In addition, his songs have been featured by cabaret artists and in musical revues throughout New York City, including Joe’s Pub.

Joshua Kant

Joshua Kant was born and raised in Nassau County, Long Island, where he started out his career performing “Domo Arigato Mister Roboto” by Styx for his entire elementary school cafeteria, sans invitation, and eventually began writing for the theatre at Hofstra University, where he earned his B.S. in Music Composition. There he also studied piano, voice, and conducting. He began working as a free lance musical director, vocal coach and writer, including a stint as theatre writer and critic for the Long Island Voice (sister paper to The Village Voice) for the entire length of its existence (1997-2000).

Josh holds an MFA from the New York University Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. His theatre writing has earned him various opportunities and awards, including a chance to be officially “mentored” by none other than Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. Evenings of Josh’s work have been performed by New Voices at the 113 Second Avenue Black Box Theatre, the Duplex Cabaret in Greenwich Village and Off-Broadway’s York Theatre Company (Developmental Reading Series). Over the years he has created, directed, and produced numerous children’s theatre productions on Long Island, where he resides with his wife and son.

UPCOMING WORKS

The Temporary Professor

CREDITS

Thirty Years, Thirty Shows

Bella! The Musical

Anna Sharpe Versus the Cyberbully

Website: http://www.joshuazkant.com/

Deborah Abramson

Gary Winter

Gary Winter was a member of OBIE-Award winning 13P. His plays have been produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville, P.S. 122, The Brick, The Flea, The Chocolate Factory, Defunkt , HERE, and the Cherry Lane Alternative. Readings of his plays at The New Group, Playwrights Horizons, Brave New World Rep, EST and The Jewish Play Project. Gary has received support from MacDowell, Dramatists Guild Fellow, Puffin and Goldberg Foundations and SEG Voices. He received a Spielberg Righteous Person’s Fellowship to study Eastern European Jewry in Krakow, Poland. Gary helps organize Pataphysics: Workshops for Playwrights, at the Flea Theater. MFA-NYU.

UPCOMING WORKS

My 10-minute play, So Unnatural a Level, won the 2105 Heideman award at the Actor’s Theater of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New Plays. More here: http://actorstheatre.org/humana-festival-of-new-american-plays/2015-play-lineup/Gary’s

10-minute play So Unnatural a Level will be performed in the 2015 HUMANA Festival at Actor’s Theater of Louisville.

CREDITS

Captain Mike

At Said

Centrifugal Force

Dead Reckoning

The Lake

Aeneas

So Unnatural a Level (10-minute play)
The White Room (10-minute play)

Website: http://garyjwinter.com/

Sheri Wilner

Sheri Wilner’s plays include Kingdom City, Bake Off, Father Joy, Relative Strangers, Labor Day, The End, and Hunger, and have been performed at such theatres as the La Jolla Playhouse, Guthrie Theater, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Naked Angels, the O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, Primary Stages, as well the Old Vic/New Voices program in London.

She is currently collaborating with Julia Jordan and DG Fellow alum Adam Gwon on Cake Off, a full-length musical adaptation of her ten-minute play Bake Off. Cake Off premiered this past fall at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, where it received a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Outstanding Musical Adaptation. Cake Off was subsequently workshopped by the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and will receive a production this summer 2016 the Bucks County Playhouse.

Playwriting awards include a Bush Artist Fellowship, two Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowships and two Heideman Awards, granted by the Actors Theatre of Louisville. Her work has been published in more than a dozen anthologies, which has led to over three hundred productions of her plays worldwide.

Also an established playwriting teacher, Sheri is currently the Program Director of the Dramatists Guild Fellows Program and was recently named the 2016-17 Monan Professor of Theatre Arts at Boston College. Previously she was the 2013-15 Master Playwright for the Miami-Dade Department of Cultural Affairs Playwrights’ Development Program; the Fred Coe Visiting Playwright-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University; and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Playwriting at Florida State University’s MFA Dramatic Writing Program. She attended Cornell University and received her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.

UPCOMING WORKS

Cake Off, Bucks County Playhouse, New Hope, PA. August 19 – September 10.

CREDITS

Kingdom City [http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-review-kingdom-city-at-la-jolla-playhouse-20140929-story.html]

Cake Off [http://dctheatrescene.com/2015/10/12/cake-off-at-signature-theatre/]

Hunger

The Miracle of Chanukah

Moving Shortly

Relative Strangers

The Unknown Part of the Ocean

Website: https://www.playscripts.com/playwrights/bios/145

Twitter: WilnerSheri
Facebook: Facebook

Lizzie Olesker

Lizzie Olesker most recently collaborated with the Talking Band on The Necklace, an 8-part serial mystery at the Ohio Theater. Some of her other plays have been developed and/or presented in NYC at New Georges/Here, 78th Street Theatre with Sightlines Theater Company, the Cherry Lane Alternative, and the Public Theater. She resides with her family in Brooklyn and teaches at NYU in the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing, at the Center for Worker Education/CCNY, and at Swarthmore College.

Deborah Zoe Laufer

Deb’s plays have been produced at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Cleveland Playhouse, Geva Theatre Center, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, ATL’s Humana Festival, Portland Stage, and eighty other theaters around the country, in Germany and in Russia. End Days was awarded The ATCA Steinberg citation and appeared at EST through an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant. Informed Concent, a Sloan commission will appear at The Duke Theatre in 2015, a co-production of Primary Stages and EST. Deb is a graduate of The Juilliard School, a recipient of a Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, and a member of The Dramatists Guild and BMI.