Bekah Brunstetter | Carla Ching | Alexis Clements | Nadia Davids
Laura Eason | Christine Evans | Charity Henson-Ballard | Kara Manning Lynn Rosen | Crystal Skillman | Andrea Thome 
BEKAH BRUNSTETTER
ALEXIS CLEMENTS
KARA MANNING
LYNN ROSEN
ANDREA THOME |
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Bekah Brunstetter's 
Originally a poet from Los Angeles, Carla Ching moved to NYC to be an English teacher. She stumbled upon the pan-Asian performance collective Peeling at the Asian American Writers Workshop and wrote and performed with them from 1998-2001, using autobiography as a departure point for performance. Her work with Peeling appeared at Second Stage Theater, The Asian American Writers Workshop, The Puffin Room, NYU, Rutgers, Cornell, Columbia University and St. Mark’s Theater. Her full-length plays include TBA (Second Generation/Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center), Dirty (finalist for the 2006 Cherrylane Mentorship Project and the 2008 Ignition Festival at Victory Gardens), Found Objects, The Ripple Effect, Big Blind/Little Blind and Project Library. Short plays include “Next Big Thing” (Vampire Cowboys), “The Further Adventures of Little Goth Girl” (2g/Public Theater), “Multicultural Education” (commissioned by Ma-Yi Theater Company/Ohio Theater), and “Dissipating Heat” (finalist for the 2005 Heideman Award from the Actors Theater of Louisville) and “Closing Up Shop” (Desipina and Company/Center Stage). She is a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and The Women’s Project Lab 2008-2010. Carla is the recipient of a 2008 Urban Artists Initiative fellowship, a 2009-2010 Teachers and Writers Fellowship and is a nominee for the 2009 Wasserstein Award. She attended Envision, Voice and Vision’s developmental retreat at Bard College in June 2009. BA, Vassar College. MFA, Actors Studio Drama School. As a teaching artist, she has worked with The New Victory Theater, Lincoln Center Institute, TDF, The Public Theater, Young Playwrights and American Place Theatre. She lives and works in New York City.
Alexis Clements. A former fellow of the Dramatists Guild of America, recipient of two Puffin Foundation Artist Grants and a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, Clements writes plays, short stories, articles and is the founder of New Acquisition. Her work has been produced and published in both the US and the UK. Recent theatrical productions include: Your Own Personal Apocalypse (New York, NY); The Interview (Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Scotland, UK); Causality (Wheeling, WV); Three Choices (Chesterfield, UK); Pieces (Washington, DC, & Iowa City, IA); Class and The Great American Novel (Washington, DC); Finding Words and Unfettered (Kansas City, MO). Her plays, Pieces and Three Choices, have both been published by KNOCK Magazine. Her short stories have appeared in a handful of literary magazines and collections, including two different anthologies published by Route (UK), Bonne Route and Ideas Above Our Station, and also on the Guardian's website. Her articles and reviews have appeared in magazines and newspapers such as The Brooklyn Rail, Nature, Aesthetica, and Travel New England. She regularly writes about experimental theater and performance art for The L Magazine. She has a M.Sc. in Philosophy & History of Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.A. in Theatre Studies from Emerson College.
Nadia Davids was born in 1977 in Cape Town. She is an award-winning South African playwright, director and scholar; her work has been produced, published and studied in Africa, Europe and North America. She has written five plays, among them At Her Feet (2002), for which she received the Fleur de Cap for best New Director and was nominated for the Noma Award for best book published in Africa. At Her Feet has been a school and university set-work in South Africa and North America since 2004. Between 2003-2004 she wrote a weekly column for The Argus; today she writes a bi monthly column for the New York based publication, The Brooklyn Rail. In June 2008, Nadia graduated with PhD in Theatre at the University of Cape Town for a thesis which traces the performative connections between archive, exile, memory and loss through the experience of forced removals under apartheid in District Six. She has received two A.W.Mellon Fellowships for her research and has been made a visiting scholar at U.C.Berkeley (2001) and New York University (2004-2006). She has lectured at UCT and NYU.
Laura Eason is the author of more than fifteen plays, both original work and adaptations. 
Christine Evans plays have received awards and been produced in her native Australia at venues including Belvoir St. Theatre (Sydney) and the Adelaide International Festival of the Arts. In the U.S., her work has been seen in New York, San Francisco, Providence, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Atlanta, Santa Rosa and Boston. Selected productions include Trojan Barbie at the A.R.T (American Repertory Theatre, scheduled 2009); All Souls Day (Perishable Theatre; Boston Theater Marathon); Weightless (Perishable Theatre); Mothergun (Perishable Theatre; Emergency Theatre Project, NYC) Slow Falling Bird (Crowded Fire) and My Vicious Angel (Belvoir St. Theatre, Sydney.) Awards and honors include a Fulbright Award, the 2007 Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the Rella Lossy Playwriting Award, the Monash National Playwriting Award (Australia), the Weston Award for Dramatic Writing, Perishable Theatres Womens Playwriting Festival (WPF) award (2000 and 2001), and the 2009 recipient of the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting. Christine is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and was a 2007 Resident Artist at Perishable Theatre. She holds an MFA (Playwriting) and Ph.D. (Theatre & Performance Studies) from Brown University. She is the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Playwriting at Harvard.
Charity Henson-Ballard, actor and emerging playwright, lives in New York City with her husband, Donald. Her first full-length play, The Quiver of Children (directed by Louis Scheeder) was originally developed in part with the support of Voice & Vision Theater ENVISION Retreat for Women Theater Artists at Bard College where she was selected to be one of 2008’s core artists. Quiver, set in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was later selected to be a part of Voice and Vision’s 2008 Play Development Showcase at the Ohio Theatre. She considers her work “language plays driven by the exploration of religious and/or cultural themes set against the backdrop of the ‘hometown device.’” Her current projects include Muddy the Waters, which was originally showcased at the World Financial Center in collaboration with the Women’s Project and River to River Festival 2009, The Great InActor Fantastic (screenplay), and the second play in the Quiver cycle, The Deep Things of God. She is also currently expanding Muddy the Waters. Her acting credits include: (Television) Stella, Law & Order: Criminal Intent; Carol, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; Nurse Olivia, Rescue Me; Stephanie Curtis, Guiding Light (Recurring); (Film) Arcade Attendant, Dance Mania Fantastic (dir. Sasie Sealy) – Winner: Tribeca Film Festival Best Short Film; Umami (dir. Genjiro Mizuhashi); (Stage) Josephine, Grace (dir. Nandita Shenoy); Cleopatra, Caesar and Cleopatra (dir. David Hammond); Debra, American Premiere of Luminosity (dir. David Hammond) in which she won the 2004 Triangle Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Drama; Hecuba, The Women of Troy (dir. Mark Wing Davey); Mama Benin, Playboy of the West Indies (dir. Tazewell Thompson); Pantalone, The Serpent Woman (dir. Ruben Polendo); Mae Pollit, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (dir. Ron Van Lieu); Kurrudavva, Nagamandala (dir. Dipanker Mukerjee); Agave, The Bacchae (Judyie Al- Bilali). Her work has also appeared in multiple commercial spots, both in television and radio (ie. McDonald’s, Meijer’s Grocery, etc.). Charity received her Master’s in English with a concentration in Renaissance Literature and Psychoanalytic Theory from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and a Master’s of Fine Arts in Acting from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. She is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, AFTRA, and the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab. 
Kara Manning’s plays, including Mind the Gap, Killing Swans, afterdark and Sleeping Rough, have been performed or developed via the Royal Court Theatre, Hampstead Theatre, the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Horizons, MCC Theater, Rattlestick, NYTW, LAByrinth Theater, the Magic Theater, New Dramatists, the Lark Play Development Center, Studio Dante, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (The 24 Hour Plays), Here (Raw Impressions), The Directors Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Makor, Expanded Arts, Theatre for the New City and the Bloomington Playwrights Project. She is the 2007-08 recipient of the Princess Grace Award in playwriting and a member of the 2008-2010 Women’s Project Playwrights Lab and MCC Theater’s Playwrights Coalition. Kara was a playwright-in-residence with the Royal Court Theatre’s International Residency, Page 73 Productions’ 2008 Yale retreat and Women's Project's 2009 Envision Lab retreat via Voice & Vision. She was a recipient of the 2000-2001 Jerome Foundation, Affiliated Writers Program grant in association with American Theatre magazine, a finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (2008), P73 fellowship (2008), the Heideman Award (2009, 2007), PlayPenn Conference (2006), Barrie Stavis Award (2005), semifinalist for the Cherry Lane Mentor Project (2007), shortlisted for NYU’s Hot Ink festival (2008) and nominee for the 2007-08 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She is the literary manager of the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York. Member of the Dramatists Guild. She served as an assistant director at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre (Fringe Festival), research assistant to Anne Bogart and the SITI Company. Kara is also a freelance music/arts journalist and a former MTV News reporter and staff writer for Rolling Stone magazine. She wrote liner notes for the Grammy-nominated Rhino box set "Respect: A Century of Women in Music.” In addition, she is a web editor/on-air interviewer for WFUV/The Alternate Side and wrangles musicians for Vin Scelsa's "Idiot's Delight" on WFUV and Uncensored Interview. Graduate of Columbia University's M.F.A. program in playwriting.
Lynn Rosen's
Crystal Skillman
Andrea Thome is a Chilean-Costa Rican, Wisconsin-born mutt who grew up navigating the multiple lanscapes and languages that now inhabit her plays. Her dramas, absurd comedies, play translations and video satires have been presented at theaters, galleries and universities around the U.S. and Latin America. She became a playwright by necessity in San Francisco, where her tiny Red Rocket Theater company avoided eviction by writing and producing a new play every 6 weeks. Andrea currently co-directs FULANA, a New York-based satire collective (and 2009 Ford Foundation grantee) that creates cutting political/cultural parodies (
