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Bios: Workshop1013 Participants

Katie Baldwin Eng
Playwright/librettist Katie Baldwin Eng's musical triptych Passage of Dreams (with composer Jeff Tang) had its world premiere in 2009 at Minneapolis' Theater Latte Da and was described as "a deeply evocative piece that ebbs and flows between the commonplace and the transcendent with uncommon grace." Baldwin Eng's work has also been produced at The Bridewell Theater in London and Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires. Her adaptation (with James Rubio) of George Macdonald's The Day Boy and The Night Girl was a 2005 finalist for the Richard Rodgers Award , was workshopped in 2008 at Premiere Musicals in Bloomington, Indiana and will be produced at Spirit of Broadway Theater in January 2011. She received her BA in comparative religion from Brown University and has an MFA in musical theater writing from NYU's Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program. She currently teaches playwriting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.

Deborah Brevoort is the author of: The Women of Lockerbie (silver medal, Onassis International Playwriting competition), The Poetry of Pizza (produced at Purple Rose, Mixed Blood, Virginia Stage), The Blue-Sky Boys (EST/ Sloan commission, produced at Barter Theatre), The Comfort Team (commissioned by Virginia Stage), Blue Moon Over Memphis (Noh Drama about Elvis Presley), The Velvet Weapon (CEC ArtsLink grant), Signs of Life, and Into the Fire (published by Samuel French). She won the Frederick Loewe Award for King Island Christmas with David Friedman and Coyote Goes Salmon Fishing with Scott Richards. Current projects: Crossing Over, an Amish hip-hop musical with Stephanie Salzman; Embedded, an Edgar Allan Poe opera for the American Lyric Theater; Steal a Pencil for Me, an opera with Gerald Cohen based on the PBS documentary. Deborah was an original company member with Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, co-founder of Theatre Without Borders, and a New Dramatists member. She teaches at Columbia University, NYU, and Goddard College.

Darren Canady
Darren Canady's False Creeds was named the winner of the Alliance Theater's Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition. His work has been seen at the Eugene O'Neill Playwriting Conference, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Quo Vadimus Arts' ID America Festival, the Fremont Centre Theatre, Chicago's Congo Square Theatre, and Old Vice Theatre (London). He was a fellow in the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program and a member of Primary Stages' Dorothy Strelsin New Writers Group. He currently teaches playwriting at the University of Kansas. BA Creative Writing - Carnegie Mellon University. MFA - New York University.

Cheryl Davis
Cheryl is a recipient of the Kleban Award for her work as a librettist, and her musical Barnstormer (about Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman flyer) received a Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award under the auspices of the Lark Play Development Center. Her play about the desegregation of the nations' school system The Color of Justice, which was commissioned by Theatreworks/USA, received critical acclaim including excellent reviews in the New York Times and Daily News and tours regularly. Her work has been read and performed nationally including at the Cleveland Play House, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Kennedy Center. Cheryl has a degree in English and a Certificate in Theatre and Dance from Princeton University. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and is an associate artist of the Milk Can Theatre Company. She is the vice president of Theater Resources Unlimited, a producers' networking organization, and is a member of the Board of the League of Professional Theater Women. She is the recipient of a 2009 Writers' Guild Award for her work as a writer for the daytime dramatic serial As the World Turns and has been nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for her work on that show. She is a practicing attorney in Manhattan and is a partner with the firm of Menaker & Herrmann LLP.

Jenny Eng
Jennie Berman Eng's plays have been read and performed in New York at Naked Angels' First Look Reading Series, The Looking Glass Theater, The Pantheon Theater, The Actor's Theater, the NY Binge Festival, and at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center. Online her work can be seen at www.funnyordie.com/jennieeng. Her writing has appeared in The Washingtonian Magazine and other publications. Jennie teaches creative writing in an afterschool program and currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter Lily, and a lot of Elmo paraphernalia. M.F.A., New School for Drama.

Willy Holtzman
Plays include: The Morini Strad (City Theatre, PlayPenn, Perry-Mansfield New Play Festival), The Real McGonagall (Portland Stage Company, New Harmony Project Walt Wangerin Fellowship), Something You Did (Primary Stages, Theatre J, People's Light and Theatre), Sabina (Primary Stages, New Jewish Theatre), Hearts (People's Light and Theatre, Asolo Theatre, Baltimore Center Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, Northlight Theatre, Alliance Theatre, Barrymore Award, Arthur Miller Award, Smith and Kraus Best New Plays), Bovver Boys (Primary Stages, Cleveland Play House, Berkshire Theatre Festival), The Closer ( GeVa Theatre, Working Theatre), Inside Out (Theatre for a New Audience, Portland Stage), Blanco (book, Goodspeed Opera House), San Antonio Sunset (New York, Los Angeles, London, Dublin, Mumbai; Best Short Plays). For film and television: Edge of America ( Peabody Award, Humanitas Prize, Writers Guild Award, Sundance Film Festival Opening Night 2004), Blood Brothers (HBO, Cine Golden Eagle Award). Willy was a Lila Wallace resident playwright at Juilliard. He serves on the board of directors at New Dramatists and Harlem Stage Company.

Georgia James
Playwright and filmmaker Georgia James' works frequently incorporate historical figures and events, e.g.: This Ground, the story of a plot of Mississippi land over the course of 100 years; Loving Jack, about legendary boxer Jack Johnson; Prosper John's Merciful Box, a post-mortem antebellum adventure; and St. Joan on Jones St. with music by David Buskin, Michael Edwin and others. Her gothic musical about Mary Shelley (Mary S., composer Roger L. Nelson, with Kathryn Morath) won Grand Prize in the American Musical Theater Festival's New Works competition (1987). Her play Stone Rabbit was a prizewinner in Delaware Theater Company's Connections Playwriting Competition (1993). White Lies, a film based on her one act play, won Best Screenplay (2002 Dublin Film and Music Fleadh), and Best Short Film (2001 Riverrun FF). Her comic solo mini-opera Morning Noon & Night (composer Carman Moore) is slated to debut in 2011 in NYC.

Kait Kerrigan
Kait Kerrigan is a playwright, bookwriter, and lyricist based in New York City. She made her off-Broadway debut with her musical Henry and Mudge (written with longtime collaborator Brian Lowdermilk) in 2006. This season, her play Imaginary Love will world premiere at the Hapgood Theatre in Antioch, CA, and her play Transit will be developed in the Lark’s annual Playwrights' Week. In 2009, her original musical The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown was produced at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, CA by Beth Williams and Broadway Across America. Kerrigan's musicals and plays have been developed by the La Jolla Playhouse, Primary Stages, Lark Play Development Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, Perry Mansfield New Works Festival, ASCAP/Disney Workshop, New York Musical Theatre Festival, National Alliance of Musical Theatre, CAP21, Goodspeed, and others. She was the recipient of the 2009 Kleban Award for most promising librettist, the 2006 Jonathan Larson Award for her work as a lyricist, and was a 2004-2005 Dramatist Guild Fellow. Other works include musicals The Freshman Experiment, Tales from the Bad Years, The Woman Upstairs, Wrong Number, and the play Disaster Relief. Kerrigan is an alumna of Barnard College as well as the BMI Advanced Musical Theatre Writing Workshop and a member of ASCAP and the Dramatists' Guild. For more information visit www.kerrigan-lowdermilk.com.

Victor Lesniewski
Victor wrote the book and lyrics for Conspiracy: A Love Story, a new musical comedy that premiered in the summer of 2010 in The Midtown International Theatre Festival. The production received five Best of the Festival nominations including Best Musical and Best Music and Lyrics. Other NYC credits include: Dogs At Their Master’s Table, or The Panopticon (The New School for Drama), First Breath After Total Devastation (NYTE’s Capture the Flag Festival), and Serious Fools (Baby's Got Backroom Festival). Victor holds a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University as well as a Bar Admission with the US Patent and Trademark Office. It follows naturally that he writes plays.

Kalle Macrides
Kalle Macrides is a Brooklyn-based playwright, performer, and educator as well as the Executive Director of Adhesive Theater Project (www.adhesivetheater.com). Her most recent play, a multimedia/dance/theater piece titled NOIR, was presented at the New York City College of Technology's Voorhees Theater. Kalle is an adjunct instructor at Brooklyn College and leads theater residencies in various New York City public schools through her association with Making Books Sing and the Women's Project Theater. Kalle holds an MA in Performance Studies from New York University and an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College.

Karen Lee Ott
Karen Lee Ott (dramaturg) was awarded the Presidential Scholarship for Dramaturgy by Columbia University and a grant by the French Consulate to study theatre in Paris. She made her radio debut as a commentator for WNYC/NPR in 2006, adjudicates for New Dramatists and FringeNYC, and awaits the publication by Samuel French of her translation of three of Ionesco's stories (produced by Untitled Theater Company #61 at The Pearl). As the recipient of the JP Adler Memorial Scholarship at The American Jewish Theatre, she served as Assistant Director to Max Mayer. In a former life, she stage managed for The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Lypsinka, among others. Karen is a usual suspect at New York Theatre Workshop, a board member of UTC #61, and a founding member of Nomad Theatrical Company. She studied French literature at the University of Chicago, art history and political science at Sarah Lawrence College/Paris, and dramaturgy at CU.

Monica Raymond
Monica Raymond's play The Owl Girl won the the Clauder Gold Medal, the 2008 Peace and Justice Prize, the 2009 Castillo Award for Political Theater, and was featured at Portland Stage's 2007 Little Festival of the Unexpected. A 2008-09 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, Raymond has received recognition from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in both poetry and playwriting. Her work has had close to sixty productions and staged readings at the Huntington Theater, Boston Theater Marathon, Actors Shakespeare Company, Stage Left, Vital Theater (NYC), Samuel French Festival, NYC and Montreal Infringement Festivals, Pillsbury House Theater, Theater Unbound, Bedlam Theater, and many others. Creche received a prize from Boston Playwrights' Platform, and Safe House received the Panelists' Choice Award at the Last Frontier Theater Festival. Novices appeared in Best Short Plays of 2009 (Smith and Kraus). Raymond has performed with the street theater troupe Class Acts, toured in "An Olive on the Seder Plate" (a review by and for American Jews about Israel/Palestine), and hosted "Theater about Israel/Palestine" at the 2005 ATHE Conference. Her poetry has been published in the Colorado Review, the Iowa Review, and the Village Voice, and she is a regular contributor to the online journal qarrtsiluni.com. She has served on the advisory board of Women Playwrights International, has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony, and has taught writing at Harvard, the Boston Museum School, and the City University of New York.

Tyler Rivenbark, originally from North Carolina, is a recent graduate of the Queens College MFA in Creative Writing program. His ten-minute play Frogs or How to Fail at Business was a finalist in Left Hip Production's 2010 From the Hip festival. He won the Audience Award for his short play Joe at John Chatterton's Short Play Lab. He is the author of several plays that have had readings at The Actors Company Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club and First Foot Theatre. In 2009 he was a writer-in-residence at the Louis Armstrong Archive. Currently he is an associate artist at First Foot Theatre, composer for Kitchen Sink Arts and a member of the Dramatists Guild. When not working on plays he can be found playing music around the city www.myspace.com/mygoodname.


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