workshop intensive FALL 2023

Twelve talented playwrights are selected to participate in The Workshop Intensives, which are collaborative dramaturgical sessions uniquely designed to support each writer wherever they are in the development of their script.

Diana Lobontiu

is a Romanian American playwright, actor, administrator, and educator based in Brooklyn. They are interested in exploring the intersections of masculinity, power, failure, oppression, absurdity, and an ongoing fixture of the human condition: loneliness. Diana was named a 2023-24 MacDowell Fellow, a 2023 Jane Hoppen Resident with Paragraph Workspace for Writers, and received the 2023 Puffin Grant for My Cousin Nelu Is Not Gay. Recent writing includes My Cousin Nelu Is Not Gay (The Brick Theater 2023, Ars Nova’s ANT Fest 2022), and Rentabutch (Bushwick Starr Reading Series Finalist 2023, MacDowell Fellowship). Playwriting MFA: Brooklyn College. www.dianalobontiu.com

Ronete Rhone Levenson

started composing ballads at an early age, which progressed into a love of playwriting, theater, film, and acting. As an actor Ronete can be seen as a recurring character on Showtime's ‘House of Lies’ with Don Cheadle. Ronete received the 2011 IRNE Award for Best Supporting Actor in Bus Stop (Huntington Theatre Company). Select Off-Broadway credits: Our Town (Barrow Street with David Cromer), Fefu and Her Friends (TFANA), What Once We Felt (LCT3), Lascivious Something (Women's Project). Select Regional Theater credits:  Our Town (Broad Stage with Helen Hunt), Circle Mirror Transformation (Cincinnati Playhouse), Hands (Sundance Theatre), August: Osage County (Old Globe). Television/ Film: Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Guiding Light, Possible Side Effects (Showtime Pilot directed Tim Robbins), Taking Woodstock (directed by Ang Lee). Ronete’s award winning short documentary 'Life Through a Lens,' screened at prestigious film festivals worldwide. Ronete went to Bard College and received a degree in Environmental Sciences and is currently finishing a Master’s degree at Columbia University in Clinical Psychology, focus on spirituality, mind, body medicine. Ronete is also a surfer.

Elise Wien

is a writer who likes to make her plays like cakes - with a frosting of slapstick comedy, a moist inner layer of complex emotional landscape, and a molten core of ethical dilemma (OPEN WIDE). Her plays include Osher & The Infinite Curtain (Residency, VoxLab), OTP (Academic Production, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre), [cowboy face] (Winner, Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for Comic Playwriting), Craters, or the making of the making of the moon landing (Academic Production, Smith College; Reading, Corkscrew Theater Festival), and cara has a hole in her head (Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival). She is a recent graduate of Boston University’s Playwriting MFA program.

 

Liv Wilson

(she/they) is a playwright, dramaturg, and theatre educator based out of Washington, D.C. Their work has been seen at The Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center, The Tank, Dramatic Question Theatre, Folger Theatre’s Works in Progress, Boise State University, The University of Texas at El Paso, and at The Premiere Theatre Playwriting Competition. Liv is the recipient of the Howard Scammon Prize for Drama and the Martin Jurow Theatre Arts Award for artistic excellence. Liv has worked as a dramaturg for Ford's Theatre, Cadence's Sitelines BLM series, Rorschach Theatre, The Tank and as a writer's assistant at The Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center's four national conferences. Liv also writes for Cadence's TV series, Bloodlines. They are a National Theatre Institute alum and a current Pipeline New Works Fellow.

Leonardo Gonzalez Dominguez

(@ieodejesus) is a Queer Mexican-Indigenous writer & performer. They originate from Guanajuato, Mexico, and Greenville, South Carolina, where the former birthed them and the latter shaped them. An undocumented upbringing in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains continues to influence their work on the deconstruction and reconstruction of space, time, and progress as they search for possible utopias in the stillness of today. They have been developed & workshopped by New York Theatre Workshop, PEN America, National Queer Theater, IATI Theater, The Players Theater, and The Workshop Theater. They have been a finalist for the Dramatist Guild Foundation’s DGF Fellowship and a semi-finalist for Breaking & Entering’s 2023/2024 season. Their prose “I was going to write a play…” was published by PEN American in the 2022 anthology of migrant writers, DREAMING OUT LOUD. They recently concluded an Artistic Fellowship with Signature Theatre for the 2022/2023 season. Leonardo holds a BFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (summa cum laude, Founders Scholar).

Dalyla Nicole

(She/they) is an Atlanta born and raised theatre-maker (performer, poet, playwright, director, dramaturg, and overall story lover). Cultural anthropology roots combined with a natural zeal for developing community through story find cadence in the theatre-making process . With professional ventures nationally and abroad in Haiti, Holland, and Australia, her work always returns to the love of the global community, curious compassion, and a good story. Her local support ranges from neighbor to practitioner to proud board member serving the Atlanta Green Theatre Alliance and Working Title Playwrights where she supports our local creative communities to practice sustainable arts advocacy. Stay connected @HeyTheresDalyla on all platforms.

Ashley M. Thomas

I was born and raised in Harlem, USA. I use she/her(s)/herself pronouns. I'm a writer, dramaturg, and arts administrator. I enjoy a good fiction book, well-designed concert merch, and cooking for the ones I love. I have a BSW and MFA. I love a good cause, a great story, and Black people.

Ashley Graves

(she/her) is a playwright born and raised in South Jersey, she has been writing all her life, but during the pandemic seriously pursued playwriting. She is a graduate from Montclair State University with a BA in Theatre Studies and English. In her free time, other than writing, she runs an etsy shop, Sour Grape Shop, and a podcast with her twin sister, Pretty Extra Podcast. As a writer, she is working on building a play cycle that discusses the care and love it takes to live in a black woman’s body. She dedicated her work to the countless black women writers who have paved the way for her to write stories about our struggles with our bodies, and the care they take to work in the America we know today.

Neeta Thadani

(she/they) is a queer Desi-American director, actor, writer, and producer for theatre, film, and podcasts. Their most recent credits include associate directing Dana During Tech Week at Mercury Store and directing White Bitches in Delhi at Columbia University. Their interests in artmaking and storytelling revolve around the crafting of the South Asian identity in America as it pertains to queerness, caste privilege, and decolonization. 

Daniel Holzman

is a writer and artist from San Francisco. His work has been produced and developed through the New York Foundation for the Arts, Clubbed Thumb, The Laguardia Performing Arts Center, The Brick, The Tank, and his plays have been finalists for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference (Me and Who, 2023), Bay Area Playwrights Festival (BERLINDIA, 2022), and Jewish Plays Project (BERLINDIA, 2022). He frequently collaborates with his sister Neena, who illustrates all his plays. BFA: NYU, Playwrights Horizons Theater School.