workshop intensive SPRING 2022
Twelve talented playwrights selected to participate in collaborative weekly dramaturgical sessions, uniquely designed to support each writer wherever they are in the development of their script.
kanishk pandey
is a writer originally from Davis, CA. At 16, he won first place in the Princeton Ten Minute Play Contest. At 19, he was a finalist for the 2018 O’Neill National Playwright’s Conference for COLONY, his first full-length play. His thesis play GLENN received a staged reading at the Broke People Play Festival of 2019, as well as in the 2019 festival kanishk created, Adopt-A-Play.com. In the fall of 2019, he graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, with a BFA in Dramatic Writing, and minors in Creative Writing and English Literature. Since then, his play Lanka in the Clouds was a featured part of The Tank's 2020 Trashfest. He has been a featured playwright at The Lark and was part of The Workshop Theater’s 2021 and 2022 Spring Intensives. His script, The Fate of the Online Cow, has received Semi-Finalist position at both the O'Neill's NPC and the Austin Film Festival, and was finalist for FMM Fellowship for Works in Heightened Language from Synecdoche Works. He is a founding member of the Submerged Writers Group. You can subscribe to his newsletter at themorningstar.substack.com - kanishkpandey.com
Allyson Dwyer
is a playwright from New Jersey.. Her full-length plays include The Hub (Semi-Finalist, Princess Grace), Nothing Remained But Voice And Bones (Clubbed Thumb Reading Series, Theater Accident Hit & Run Reading Series, Semi-Finalist New American Voices and NAP at Normal Ave), Arrow of Time (The Brick), and You Are The Dream. Her short play, An Instant Message, was a top twelve Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Festival finalist. Most recently she was a semi-finalist for Pipeline Theatre's PlayLab and had a monologue published in a book by Theatre Unbound. She's currently working on an audio play as part of the inaugural SoundLab at The Brick, and was a 2020-2021 member of Clubbed Thumb's Early Career Writer's Group where she received the Constitution Commission. She loves bunnies, missing the old days of the internet, and dreaming. Say hi to her at allysondwyer.com.
Sam Mayer
is a playwright and performance maker from Houston. Full length works include THE CUCK (Intramural Productions), POOLBOY2: MAXIMUM CLOSURE (Crashbox), POOLBOY00 (UTNT), and CHET'S SUMMER VACATION (Kennedy Center; Intramural Productions; Rec Room Arts). His work has been developed with support from Salvage Vanguard/Choke Incubator, The Mastheads, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. MFA: Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin.
Roger Benington
is a New York-based theatre maker from Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a past recipient of the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Young Artist Fellowship to study directing under mentors Michael Kahn, JoAnne Akalaitis and the late Garland Wright at The Juilliard School. Roger began his journey as a playwright when he was asked to direct 4th and 5th graders in Utah. Working closely with his young collaborators, he created Timocina & the Crocodiles, which was selected by The Drama League for development in their New Directors/New Works Project. He has subsequently authored several plays for children including The Dark Shadow, Ivona & the Voice Within, The Secret in the Shoebox. Much of Benington’s work has similarly been created through collaboration. With actors at the Sundance Theatre Lab, Benington devised the musical Sanctuary! from Paul Monette’s novella of the same name. His adaptation of The Arabian Nights—each production newly minted by each successive cast—has played to audiences at The Edinburgh Fringe, the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, The WITS Amphitheatre in Johannesburg, and Tooth & Nail Theatre in Salt Lake City, for which he was both artistic director and founder. For Tooth & Nail’s educational outreach program, Benington developed Project Fabulocity!—a play by and about Queer youth in Salt Lake City. A commission from the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival led to Cabaret de Curiosities, a cornucopia of acts by 24 burlesque, arial-arts, and drag performers woven together to create the story of shy postal worker’s sexual liberation. Benington’s script-sketch for The Mormon Bird Play was initially workshopped over several months with six New York actors, and later performed by different casts at the New York International Fringe Festival and at Washington Ensemble Theatre in Seattle. Original plays include The Bear’s Fur Coat, Blue Mozzie, the pangs, Avalon, Epiphany. His play Psychopomp was commissioned by Canal Cafe Theatre in London as part of their “American Season,” and was recently produced and directed by the author at The Art Castle in Salt Lake City. Roger’s latest play Small Acts, which he is developing in the Workshop Theater’s Workshop Intensive, was given an initial public reading in late 2021, with support from a New York City Artist Corp Grant.
Dr. Kristen Wright
is a playwright, dramaturg, and scholar whose work exists at the intersections of African-American drama (from the 19th century to the present), Black performance studies, and critical theory. Her plays Apple Core, Miss Anne, The Shirt (Civility), Jamal From Empire, Jodeci for White Girls, and The Pop Cycle were produced at Cornell University and the Spring Writes! Literary Festival and Dr. Wright's work has been previously developed at Yale University and the Alley Theatre's Houston Young Playwrights Exchange. She is currently the Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow in the Department of English at Mount Holyoke College and will begin a new position as Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Drama, Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in the fall of 2022. PhD, MA: Cornell, MA: Columbia, BA: Yale.
Lisa M. Konoplisky
Lisa’s plays have appeared at Lyceum Theatre (NY), Blue Box World (NY), Camanea Theater (Chicago), Stockyards Theatre (Chicago), Speaking Ring Theater (Chicago), Theatre Limina (Minneapolis), That Uppity Theatre Company (St. Louis), and Icarus Falling (Lansing). She was a guest artist at the University of Wyoming School of Theatre and Dance, where her play, American Bowl, will receive a 2022 reading. She was a finalist for The PlayGround Experiment’s Faces of America Monologue Festival for her monologue You Knew. She was a contributing playwright at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference (2021) Her plays have been chosen for the Last Frontier Theatre Conference Playlab in Valdez, AK for nine consecutive years (2013-2021). She was a resident playwright at the Annex Theatre Hothouse Project (Seattle), a finalist for Chicago Dramatists’ Residency Program, an alternate selection for the Inge Theatre Festival for her play Closer and a semi-finalist for the Ashland New Play Festival for her play Dog Park. Her play American Bowl is in development with the Blank Theatre in Los Angeles. She won Chicago’s first annual Writing and Drinking Festival for her play 12 Steps which was then performed by the Neo-Futurists and Factory Theatre. Her full-length play, Dog Park, will be produced in 2023 at Cyrano’s Theatre in Anchorage, AK. She has received residencies at The Ragdale Foundation, Jentel Artist’s Residency and at Elsewhere Studios. A reading of several scenes of her play-in-progress, Redemption Game, was held at The Bechdel Group in NY. Lisa currently lives in Madison, WI where she works as a storyteller, teacher, and mentor with minoritized, marginalized communities of high-school students in Dane County, WI through the Wisconsin Story Bridges (WSB) project. She conducts trainings along with members of the University of Wisconsin School of Education with these teens using Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and story-telling techniques to empower these teens to go into their home communities, research the issues that affect and define their lives and construct narratives out of those lived experiences. BA: Lafayette College. MFA (Creative Writing) Columbia College Chicago. She will begin joining the 2024 MFA in Playwriting at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Lisa also works as a strength, movement and kettlebell coach.
Charles Gershman
(he/they) is a queer playwright/TV writer, Dramatists Guild Foundation Playwriting Fellow, Chesley/Bumbalo Playwriting Award winner, and Relentless Award Semifinalist. Recent work has been produced or developed with The New Group, All For One, 59E59 Theaters, the Mercury Store, the American Playwriting Foundation, Theatre503, and the Kennedy Center, and published by Bloomsbury/Oberon Books. They are a 2021 Drama League Award nominee and currently a visiting assistant professor of writing at Wesleyan University. web: charlesgershman.com. IG: @charlesgershman
Mylan Gray
(they/he) studied playwriting and Black studies at Stanford University where he received the Kennel Jackson Jr. Departmental Award for his Honors thesis play, Buried in Blood: an afro-surrealist, ancestral conjuring. He is a member of the Tank Theatre’s LIT Council and he is currently in the 2022 Workshop Intensives at Workshop Theater. He has participated in the Writing Downtown Residency in Las Vegas working to work on a Black, dystopian Sci-fi television pilot. In addition to being a playwright, he is also a screenwriter and director. He has been produced by the Lit Council at the Tank Theater. In the fall, he will study playwriting at UC San Diego.
Alicia Margarita Olivo
is a Houston-based Mexican American playwright, performer, and weather enjoyer, whose work focuses on the fiery interactions between identity, gender, rage, and memory. Alicia is currently part of The Workshop Theater's Spring 2022 Workshop Intensive, The 2022 Citadel of Playwrights Cohort, and the 2021-2022 Rec Room Writers Group cohort. Most recently, Alicia's play COUNT YOURSELF AMONG THE LUCKY received a reading as part of the 2022 Sin Muros: A Borderless Teatro Festival. Alicia’s plays have been developed and received readings with Stages, Company One Theater, The Workshop Theater, Teatro Chelsea, Telatúlsa, AlterTheater, and The Inkwell Theater. Alicia has been a Finalist for AlterTheater and La Lengua Teatro's Historias de Descolonización Commission, Finalist for Theatre Lab at FAU's Fair Play Initiative, Finalist for Texas State University's Black and Latino Playwrights Celebration New Play Development Workshops, and a Semi-Finalist for The Future of Playwriting Prize, twice. Alicia holds a B.A. in Theatre Studies and Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies from Wellesley College. Alicia loves talking about comic books, good food, and the weather. @aliciamargaritx
Sarah Gallegos
is a New York based writer and filmmaker. She is passionate about exploring the "gray areas" and challenging traditional storytelling narratives and structures. She is excited by the concept of time - and the interconnectedness of the past, present, and future. Through her work, she is continuously delving deeper into investigations of self-discovery and endeavors to lean into fear and embrace failure. Some favorite writing credits include: Anniversary Play (play; staged reading with The TEAM’s Petri Project FY22), pre-face (short film; Project Spotlight featured on thelightleaks.com February 2022), and the short story ‘I Am My Own Abuela’ published in the online publication MixedMag (mixedmag.co) sarah-gallegos.com
Peter Pasco
An O'Neill finalist, a Steinberg playwright award winner, and an MFA from Yale, all of these are distinctions that Peter Pasco has not achieved. Perhaps one day? He did grow up in the Bronx rooting for the Yankees, the Giants, and Nets. -I know, I know but those Jason Kidd years were dope. After graduating from NYU he moved to LA to act where it is always sunny and hot, everywhere there is Valet, and the state bird is a Prius. Just kidding it is obviously a Tesla. Since he has achieved every acting goal he ever wanted working in tv, film, and commercials; and he has appeared in the Washington Post and the LA Times (twice!) now he is setting his sights on playwriting. He is grateful for the chance to further develop his work alongside such a creative group of individuals like Marissa Joyce Stamps and the Boston Court’s own Adrian Centeno. Look out other playwrights!
Zhen Yu Yao
[he/they] is a Chinese multi-disciplinary artist and arts educator. He recently made his Mandarin playwriting debut with Ripples from a Lost Song (Rattlestick). He was a recent grant recipient of the NYFA City Artist Corps, and a finalist for Pipeline Theatre Company’s PlayLab. He was also the first place winner for NFFTY’s Editing Challenge 2022. Theatre: Reality Show (NYU Shanghai), Man of La Mancha (Symphony Space), Precipice: The Escape Room Experience (NYU Tisch), BREAKOUT (198 Allen St.). Film: Paradise Lost (Co-Writer & Co-Producer). Education: MA in Arts Politics + BFA in Drama (NYU Tisch). @yeung.vic.yao