LAB PLAYWRIGHTS
2012-2014

Kara Lee Corthron
Sarah Gancher
Virginia Grise
Dipika Guha
Lauren Yee


Click here for a list of Playwrights Lab Alumnae.

KARA LEE CORTHRON
Contact: Beth Blickers, Abrams Artists Agency

Kara Lee Corthron’s plays include Julius by Design (Fulcrum, July 2011), Etched in Skin on a Sunlit Night (InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia, June 2012), AliceGraceAnon (New Georges, October-November 2012), Holly Down in Heaven (Forum Theatre in D.C. and Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul, MN, Fall 2012), Spookwater, Listen for the Light, Electric Persephone in the Scorpion’s Den, and Wild Black-Eyed Susans.  Awards include: The Vineyard Theatre’s 3rd Annual Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the Princess Grace Award, two NEA grants, the Helen Merrill Award, Lincoln Center’s Lecomte du Nouy Prize (three-time recipient), an E.S.T./Sloan Commission, the Theodore Ward Prize, the New Professional Theatre Writers Award, two MacDowell fellowships, residencies at Skriðuklaustur (Iceland), the Millay Colony, and Ledig House. Current commissions: South Coast Rep, New Georges, and InterAct. Her plays have been produced and/or developed at the African Continuum Theatre (D.C.), Ars Nova, CenterStage (Baltimore), Electric Pear, E.S.T., Haulbowline Theatre Group (Cork, Ireland), Horizon Theatre (Atlanta), the Kennedy Center, Naked Angels, New Dramatists, New Georges, New York Theatre Workshop, The Orchard Project, Page 73, Penumbra, PlayPenn Conference (2010), The Shalimar, Seven Devils Playwrights Conference (Guest Artist), South Coast Rep, TheatreWorks (Palo Alto), the Vineyard Theatre, and Voice & Vision among others. TV: writer for NBC’s Kings (2008-2009). Kara is a Juilliard alumna, an instructor at Primary Stages’ Einhorn School of Performing Arts, a New Georges Affiliated Artist, and a member of Interstate 73 (2007-2008), the Ars Nova Play Group (2010-2011), ‘Wright On! Playwrights Group (co-founder), Blue Roses Productions, the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America.

SARAH GANCHER
Website: www.sarahgancher.org
Contact: Diana Glazer, ICM.

Sarah is a playwright with a passion for epic stories, big ideas, and deep comedy. A native of Oakland, California, she is a member of the 2012 Ars Nova Play Group and the 2012-2014 Women’s Project Playwrights Lab. Her plays include Klauzál Square (winner, OPEN: The New Jewish Theater Residency at the 14th Street Y; Budapest’s Quarter6Quarter7 Festival), Con (Squidshow, Telluride, CO), Seder (readings in Budapest’s Quarter6Quarter7 Festival, Great Plains Theater Festival Play Labs, NYU Tisch Goldberg Theatre), and Cataclysm (Squidshow, site specific at Deep Creek Mine, Telluride, CO). Sarah is the collaborating playwright on The TEAM’s Mission Drift (PS 122 COIL Festival, NYC: Drama League Nomination for Distinguished Production of a Musical; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh: Scotsman Fringe First, Herald Angel, Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Award). She wrote lyrics for Chisa Hutchinson’s puppet musical Tunde’s Trumpet (NYC SummerStage). She was a recent finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the Six Points Fellowship. Sarah is currently completing 7th, a seven-part series of plays big and small about Budapest’s historically Jewish Seventh District, to be produced by Budapest’s Sirály Arts Center. She has worked behind the scenes at The Colbert Report, the Metropolitan Opera Guild, Big Apple Circus, and Norway’s Stellapolaris. As a jazz violinist, Sarah has played in groups from New Orleans to Budapest. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU.

VIRGINIA GRISE

An award-winning theatre artist, Virginia Grise is a writer, performer and director. From panzas to prisons, from street theatre to large-scale multimedia performances, from princess to chafa, Virginia writes plays that are set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops, and lesbian bedrooms. Her work has been produced, commissioned and developed at the Alliance Theatre, Bihl Haus Arts, Company of Angels, Cornerstone Theatre, Highways Performance Space, New York Theatre Workshop, Playwright’s Center, Pregones Theatre, REDCAT, Victory Gardens and Yale Repertory Theatre. Her play blu was a recipient of the Yale Drama Series Award and was recently published by Yale University Press. Her other published work includes The Panza Monologues (University of Texas Press) and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Durito (Autonomedia Press). She is a recipient of the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing, the Jerome Fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center and was a finalist for the Kennedy Center’s Latina/o Playwriting Award, Alliance Theatre’s Kendeda Award, and the LARK Play Development Center’s Playwrights of New York (PONY) Award. She has performed both nationally and internationally at venues including the Jose Marti Catedra in Havana, Cuba and the University of Butare in Rwanda, Africa. As an activist she has facilitated organizing efforts among women, immigrant, Chicano, working class and queer youth. Virginia has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers and in the juvenile correction system. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.

DIPIKA GUHA
Contact: Bret Adams Ltd., enquiries to morsini(at)bretadamsltd.net

Dipika Guha’s plays include, The Rules (Superlab at Playwrights Horizons and Clubbed Thumb), Passing (Cutting Ball Theatre’s RISK IS THIS Festival 2013), The Betrothed (Chester Theatre and Wellfleet Harbour Actors Theatre) and Herculine and Lola (WordBRIDGE lab). Her short plays include In the Red, White, and Blue (Heideman Award finalist), A Brief History of America (Lucille Lortel Commission) and An American Dream (Old Vic New Voices, Berkshire Playwrights Gala). Her work has also been developed at the Lark, the Flea, Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Black Swan Lab, Old Vic New Voices, Ars Nova, New Century Theatre Company, Theatre 4, Tobacco Theatre (UK), the Djerassi Residency Artists Program, SPACE at Ryder Farm and the Ucross Foundation. She is a member of the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab 2012-2014, Ars Nova Playgroup and the Dramatists Guild. Dipika is a graduate of the MFA Playwriting Program at the Yale School of Drama, where she studied under Paula Vogel, and an alumna of the Young Writers Program at the Royal Court Theatre in London. She was born in India and raised in Cochin, London and Moscow. 

LAUREN YEE
Website: www.laurenyee.com

Born and raised in San Francisco, Lauren Yee is a playwright whose work includes Ching Chong Chinaman; Crevice; Hookman; in a word; A Man, his Wife, and his Hat; and Samsara. She has been a Dramatists Guild fellow, a MacDowell fellow, and a member of The Public Theater Emerging Writers Group. She has had her work developed at Lincoln Center Theatre/LCT3, The Public Theater, PlayPenn, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Victory Gardens’s IGNITION Festival, the Hangar Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Kitchen Dog Theatre, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, Aurora Theatre’s Global Age Project, and others. Her plays have received productions at AlterTheater, Artists at Play, Company One, Impact Theatre, Moxie Theatre, Mu Performing Arts, Pan Asian Rep, and SIS Productions. She was a finalist for the Heideman Award, the Jerome Fellowship, the PEN USA Literary Award, the PONY Fellowship, the Princess Grace, and the Wasserstein Prize. Awards include three Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival playwriting awards (the Paula Vogel, Paul Stephen Lim, and Jean Kennedy Smith awards), as well as Kumu Kahua Theatre’s Pacific Rim Prize and the NETC John Gassner Prize. In the 2012/2013 season, you can catch her full-length work at City Lights Theatre Company, fu-GEN, the Hub Theatre, and Mu Performing Arts. She is currently working on commissions from Mu Performing Arts (supported by the MAP Fund) and Lincoln Center Theatre. She is represented by Antje Oegel. BA: Yale. MFA: UCSD.