Georgina Escobar

El Paso, Texas

Georgina Escobar is a Mexican-American playwright, director, and arts educator whose work spans theatre, film, and audio. Her plays explore sci-femme mythologies, Latinx futurity, and speculative musical aesthetics, with productions across the U.S., Canada, México, and Europe. A 2019 Kilroys List honoree (Stoneheart) and O’Neill NMTC Writer (Little Duende), her musical theatre work includes Desaparecidas (with Jaime Lozano & Florencia Cuenca), Vinyl Cafe (with Colleen Dauncey & Akiva Romer-Segal), and Frida (with director Diane Paulus). Escobar teaches Musical Theatre Writing at Dartmouth, with a focus on collaborative creation and speculative dramaturgy. Her published work appears in Routledge, McSweeney’s, Smith & Kraus, among others.

Instagram: @thegeorginaescobar

Jessi Pitts

Seattle, Washington

Jessi Pitts (she/her/any) is a playwright and librettist based in Seattle, WA. She is the book writer and co-lyricist of Hijinx & Sue, a musical in collaboration with songwriter Daniel J.F. Wolfert. (Check out the Hijinx & Sue Substack to follow their musical writing journey!)

Her work seeks to uplift queer voices, and to explore familiar emotions by utilizing the unfamiliar and fantastic.

She has been the recipient of the 2019 Gary Garrison National Ten Minute Play Award through the ACTF (Silver Sixpence), a semi-finalist for Union Arts Center’s 2026 New Works Northwest (Diamonds & Toads), and a semi-finalist for Syracuse University’s New Works New Voices Initiative (Hijinx & Sue.)

Jessi’s work has recently been produced through Sapphest: NYC’s Premier Sapphic Play Festival, Tacoma Little Theatre, Oregon Contemporary Theatre, and Western Washington University. She is a member of SCRiB LAB’s 2026 Play Lab Cohort.

When not writing, she adjudicates for a variety of theatre festivals, including the ACTF and Washington Thespys. She will never say no to a leisurely-paced hike at home in the Pacific Northwest, and will gladly point out whenever the mountain is out.

Find out more about Jessi at jessipitts.weebly.com.

Instagram: @jessipitts

Jennine Krueger

Atlanta, Georgia

Jennine “DOC” Krueger is a mother, writer, musical-theatre creator, poet-lyricist, artivist, public speaker, and educator based in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is pursuing an MFA in Film and Television at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Her work blends hip-hop, history, folklore, and social justice into bold, genre-bending musical storytelling that puts marginalized voices front and center, where they belong.

Her hip-hop musical Green, a remix of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight filtered through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is currently in development with Theatre Now New York’s National Musical Development Lab. She is also developing new musicals centered on Doris Miller, a Black WWII hero, and a reframed Salem Witch Trials story told from the perspective of Tituba. Her current musical focus, Cuttin’ Heads, is a blues-soaked, 1930s barbershop musical rooted in the legend of Robert Johnson at the crossroads, harmonizing urban folklore with a descent worthy of Dante himself. Poetry is her first language and primary medium.

A nationally recognized poet, Jennine has earned multiple slam titles, coached national teams, and mentored writers in performance and dramatic storytelling. Her dramatic work has won Best of Fest five times at Austin’s Frontera Festival, and she was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Good River Review. Her anime screenplay pilot Ars Poetica, a poetry-powered exploration of mental health, won Best TV Pilot at the Tokyo Screenwriting Festival.

An HBCU alumna of Huston-Tillotson University, Jennine holds an M.Ed. from Concordia University and an MFA in Poetry from Spalding University.

Ben Zeadman

Los Angeles, California

Ben Zeadman is an award-winning composer, writer, and music producer working across musical theatre, film, and television. He is the recipient of the ASCAP Foundation’s 2023 Lucille & Jack Yellen Award, honoring emerging excellence in musical theatre composition.

For screen, Ben composed the music for the short musical film Marriage Material, a 2019 Student Academy Award semifinalist that was acquired by Fox Searchlight and is currently in development as a feature film with Fifth Season. His credits also include serving as composer and music producer for Disney’s Emmy-nominated stop-motion holiday special Mickey Saves Christmas, which received a 2023 Hollywood Music in Media Award nomination for Best Song. Additional screen work includes Paramount’s feature film Honor Society, along with other projects for major studios and platforms.

For the stage, Ben began writing musicals at age seventeen and has since created an extensive body of work. His portfolio includes over 60 original works, earning multiple awards and international recognition. He is the creator of the award-winning musical It Takes Two and wrote the songs for the Off-Broadway musical The Next Stop. Ben is also the co-creator, alongside Laura Schein, of the new musical Miss Hysteria. The project was a 2025 Eugene O’Neill National Music Theater Conference Finalist and has been developed through several prestigious programs, including the ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop with Stephen Schwartz (2023), the Johnny Mercer Foundation Goodspeed Writers Grove (2025), and the 2026 Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals.

Instagram: @benzeadman, @zeadmanandschein, @misshysteriamusical

Laura Schein

Los Angeles, California

Laura Schein is an award-winning actor/writer/lyricist and the recipient of ASCAP Foundation’s 2023 Lucille & Jack Yellen Award, recognizing outstanding emerging musical-theatre writers.

Laura is the co-creator (book/lyrics) of the acclaimed Off-Broadway musical Emojiland, which premiered at NYMF before transferring Off-Broadway in 2020, where she also originated the role of Smize. Emojiland was a New York Times Critics’ Pick, a Richard Rodgers Award Finalist, and received nominations from the Drama Desk Awards, Lucille Lortel Awards, Outer Critics Circle Awards, and the Off-Broadway Alliance Awards. The show has since enjoyed a growing life beyond New York through regional productions.

For the screen, Laura co-wrote the Kelly Clarkson/Janelle Monáe duet “Unbreakable” for the STX animated feature UglyDolls, shortlisted for the 2020 Academy Awards. She has written lyrics for a wide range of projects, including Disney’s Emmy-nominated stop-motion special Mickey Saves Christmas (Hollywood Music in Media nomination for “Best Song”) and Paramount’s Honor Society. She’s also a lyricist on the musical feature Marriage Material, in development with Fifth Season. Her half-hour comedy pilot script Thrup was a semi-finalist at the 2021 Austin Film Festival.

Laura is the co-creator (book/lyrics), alongside Ben Zeadman, of the new musical Miss Hysteria, a 2025 Eugene O’Neill NMTC Finalist. The show has been developed through the ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop with Stephen Schwartz (2023), the Johnny Mercer Foundation Goodspeed Writers Grove (2025), and was selected for the 2026 Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals. Laura is a magna cum laude graduate of

Instagram: @thelillaura @zeadmanandschein @misshysteriamusical

Kari Barclay

Cleveland, Ohio

Kari Barclay (they/them) is a playwright, director, and theater maker interested in deepening audiences’ sense of time and sparking curiosity about sexuality and gender. Based in Cleveland, Ohio, they teach a new generation of artists at Oberlin College and craft plays in the Midwest and beyond.

Kari’s original comedy Can I Hold You? was one of the first full-length plays about asexuality performed in the U.S. and enjoyed a sold-out run in San Francisco and workshop in New York. It has been taught at colleges and universities across the country and published in Marathi language translation. Kari’s play Stonewallin’ was the winner of the 2021 Southern Queer Playwriting Festival and opened at Richmond Triangle Players in February 2022. New projects include a solo show about sexuality and crossword puzzles, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac around a seventh-century genderqueer poet, and a meditation on wildfire and queer history in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In their other life, Kari is a theater scholar and historian with a focus on politics and performance. Their nonfiction book, Directing Desire, examines the rise of consent-based approaches to staging sex in contemporary theater, known as intimacy choreography. Kari earned their PhD in Theater and Performance Studies in 2021 from Stanford University, where they studied with playwright Young Jean Lee. They are an alum of the Humanity in Action Fellowship, the Headlands Center for the Arts Artists Residency, and Directors Lab North. kari-barclay.com. Instagram at @karibarclay

Gretchen Suárez-Peña

Boca Raton, Florida

Gretchen Suárez-Peña is a Puerto Rican playwright based in Florida. She received her MFA in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama (Class of 2024). She is an Assistant Professor at Florida Atlantic University Department of Theatre and Dance. She is currently the book writer for Sometimes Love (music and lyrics by Michael Mott). Her play, Epiphany, was the winner of the 2025 Tampa Bay Theatre Festival Staged Reading competition. Her play, 2052, is part of the Theater Masters Take Ten anthology published through Concord Theatricals. Her piece Searching for Abuelo was the first-place winner at the 2023 Voices of Women Theatre Festival, the best full-length play at the 2023 Tampa Bay Theatre Festival, and an official selection of the 2024 NYC Downtown Urban Arts Festival and the SheATL Festival. Her show Across the Atlantic opened the 2023 BIPOC Play Reading Series at the Straz Center in Tampa, Florida. Her short play, The Arithmetic of Memory, has been produced across the country and was published in the Stonecoast Review, where it was nominated for a Pushcart Award in Drama (2021). It was the 2023 Gary Garrison National Ten-Minute Play Award winner for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF). Her play, With a Torch of Seven Virtues, was the 2nd Place Latinx Playwriting Award recipient for the 2024 National KCACTF. A portion of her work is available to be read on the New Play Exchange, and she is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild.

Instagram:@playsbygretchen

Lolita Stewart-White

Miami, Florida

Poet, playwright, screenwriter, and educator Lolita Stewart-White lives and works in Miami. Her full-length plays have been developed at City Theatre Miami’s Homegrown Playwriting Development Program and the Miami Light Project. Stewart-White has received commissions from the Coconut Grove Theater Festival, Miami 1 Acts, and City Theatre Miami. She is the author of black frag/ments, winner of Hub City Press’s Poetry Readers Series Prize, selected by Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones. Stewart-White’s art pushes black poetic expressiveness. She experiments with genre and form and utilizes linguistic economy to manipulate words on the page as a form of resistance. Her poems have appeared in the African American Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, and the NAACP award-winning anthology, “This is the Honey,” (Little, Brown/Hatchette, 2024) edited by New York Times bestselling author, Kwame Alexander. Stewart-White’s honors include O’Neill National Playwriting Center semifinalist, Paris American Reader Series winner, and the Boston Review’s Poetry Contest finalist, selected by Sonia Sanchez. Stewart-White also received fellowships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Sundance Institute Miami Screenwriter’s Intensive, Cave Canem Poetry Retreat.

Thelma Virata de Castro

San Diego, California

Thelma Virata de Castro is a Filipinx dramatist based in San Diego whose plays explore identity and belonging. She looks to Nature for inspiration and studies with Writing theWild. She was a commissioned artist for The Old Globe and has been awarded grants from The William Male Foundation, California Humanities, Far South/Border North, and San Diego Foundation. Selected productions, festivals, and readings include Asian Story Theater, Playwrights Project, Southwestern College, CIRCA-Pintig’s Chicago Filipino American Theatre Festival, Loud Fridge Theatre Group’s New Year, New Draft, Magnolia Theatre Company’s Femme Artisan Series, and The Old Globe’s Powers New Voices Festival. Thelma’s interview-based work with Asian Story Theater investigated history and race within specific communities, with subjects ranging from the incarceration of Japanese Americans to contemporary mixed racial identity. She acted as a playwright and Community Liaison for Halo-halo, which centered San Diego’s Filipinx stories. Access Inc. awarded her the Esperanza Award for extraordinary commitment to eradicating domestic violence in San Diego County for “The Fire in Me,” which examined domestic violence in the Filipinx community. She was a 2022 finalist for the AGE Legacy Playwright grant from Advance Gender Equity in the Arts. She received three Hedgebrook residencies and attended the A Room of Her Own Foundation retreat. She serves on the San Diego Writers, Ink Board of Directors and the Dramatists Guild National Affairs Committee. She works as a teaching artist and dramaturg. The San Diego Union-Tribune included her in its list of Phenomenal San Diego Women: Creators and Performers.

Instagram:@tvdecastro