workshop intensive WINTER 2024
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.
Camille Simone Thomas
(she/her) is a Detroit-born Jamaican-American. She was a 2023 Broadway Advocacy Coalition Artivism fellow where her play What We Deserve premiered as a staged reading at MCC Theater. Her plays have been workshopped with Playwrights Horizons, Sanguine Theatre Company, featured with The Obie Award-winning Harlem9 and Detroit Public Theatre Company, Dixon Place, The National Women's Theatre Festival, Lime Arts Theatre Company, American Slavery Project, and Blackboard playwriting series. She was a 2023 New Harmony Project finalist, 2023 Catskills Creative Residency finalist, a 2023 Van Lier New Voices Fellowship Semi-finalist and a 2022 Art House Inkubator Finalist. She’s an associate artist with the Sanguine Theatre Company. She’s had fellowships with The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute’s DEAR Fellowship and The Theatre Producers of Color program.
Brittney S. Harris
(she/her) is an internationally recognized professor, director, and performance-based activist from Virginia. Her areas of expertise are in Race and Performance, Performance as Activism, and Devised Community-Engaged Theatre. As an artist, her approach to creativity centers on providing a sacred space for discovery, exploration, and individuality by highlighting narratives of social resilience and redemption. Over the past decade, her short plays have been featured in numerous play festivals throughout the U.S., including the Fade to Black Theatre Festival and Different Strokes! Performing Arts Collective, Three-Six-Nine (3-6-9) Monologue and Short Play Festival, and the Ivoryton Playhouse Women Playwrights Festival. In addition to her playwriting efforts, she is workshopping and touring her two solo performance projects, The Intersection: The Sandra Bland Project and Being B.A.D.; each project explores the adverse effects of violence in social media on the personal psyche and evolving how narratives of cultural resilience are shared, remembered, and perhaps incite a dialogue in promoting social justice reform and change without appropriation. Stay connected @iambrittneysharris on IG.
Cori Diaz
is a playwright currently studying at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She was a house team performer and sketch writer at the Sea Tea Comedy Theater in Hartford, CT. For playwriting, she has been a finalist in Hartford Stage’s Write On!, a selected candidate in Middlebury College’s Young Writers’ Conference, and a Selected Playwright at the Eugene O’ Neill Theater Center’s Young Playwrights Festival. She has also done training for improv, sketch, and stand-up with Second City, People's Improv Theater, The Groundlings, AsylumNYC, and Sea Tea Improv. For the past two years, Cori has worked as a Managing Actor-Educator for the nonprofit Speak About It!, a theater company that teaches boundaries and consent education to college students.
J.C. Pankratz
(they/them) is a queer, trans, non-binary playwright and educator creating lyrical, genre-defying work about gender, class, trauma, and transformation. Their plays are Mortals (Pridefest at The Tank), Eat Your Young (workshop production, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre), Little Kingdom (2nd Place, Mark Twain Playwriting Award; Distinguished Achievement, Paula Vogel Playwriting Award), Seahorse (2021 FMM Fellowship for Works in Heightened Language), and Redeemer Mine (Finalist, O’Neill Playwrights Conference). Beloved collaborators also include Bunchaqueers, CompanyOne, and Kitchen Dog Theater. They are a 2023 Core Apprentice with the Playwrights’ Center, a 2023 Visionary Playwright with Theatremasters, a current Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow, and an extremely amateur whittler.
Dom Martello
is a trans playwright, performer, dramaturg, and gender consultant based in NYC. Their work centers trans and queer experiences through genre and structure. Their work has been developed by Syracuse University, We Who Wander, The Elif Collective’s FireWorks Lab, and The Strides Collective’s Emerging Playwright Program. Their dramaturgy has been seen off-broadway and in developmental work. As a gender consultant, Dom conducts workshops to increase trans literacy in cis-dominated spaces. The intersection of joy, activism, and exorcism is the central tenet of their practice.
Darius Adamson Jr.
(he/him) is a multi-hyphenate actor, writer, director, and producer. Born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina, Darius is now based in Brooklyn, New York. Darius recently graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (Beth Turner Award Recipient), with a BFA in Theatre and Business of Entertainment, Media, and Technology. During his time at NYU Tisch, Darius completed his training at Playwrights Horizons Downtown Theater School, where he honed his craft as a multi-disciplinary theater-maker. Darius also completed his training at Stonestreet Studios, where he studied screen acting and filmmaking. Darius is also honored to be affiliated with Black Theatre United as one of the organization’s mentees. In a social landscape that is increasingly dominated by cynicism and nihilism, Darius finds it crucial to infuse his art with joy and proactive hope. Through his work, Darius strives to inspire audiences and create spaces that foster creativity, imagination, and connection.
Peter Pasco
Jose Rivera. Quiara Alegria Hudes. Peter Pasco!...Not really sure what the connection is, but if you find one please let Peter or the Workshop Theater know ASAP. Peter was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx. And well, he could go on and on about how he graduated from NYU or how he’s an actor and he just started playwriting during the pandemic, or how he loves cereal, but wouldn’t you rather hear some of his bars (Jay Z’s Roc Boys instrumental plays): Annnnd the winner’s not HOV, it’s Peeete/ the Bronx boy’s in a workshop tonite/ Oh what a feelin, he’s gonna rewrite/ facilitators share mad insights/ next draft’s not far outta sight/ An actor like Benedict Cumberbadge/ his hero’s stay on a fantastic voy-adge/ beats, conflicts, stage direction, plots/ word counts? Oh, he’s got lots/ style’s so sweet it taste like Motts/ his tweets even get confused with bots/ learning and gleaning from other playwrights/ he just got a call back for “In the Heights”/ Equity minimum is the actor’s plight/ bleeding actors dry like Oliva Rodrigo’s vampire/ doing me dirty like Omar on “the Wire”/ got me sweatin like Jim Carrey “Liar, Liar”/ A 21st century kind of guy/ word choices that are never shy/ No, he’s never seen Cobra Kai/ he’s gonna say what he’s gonna say/ Katt Williams Club Shay Shay/ Trying to be the first Peruvian on Broadway, baybay, baybay.
Jason Wang
(they/them) is a playwright from Queens, NY writing 4-person full-length dramedies about small moments-- sliced fruits, homoerotic video game rage sessions-- slices of life we spend waiting for brighter futures to come. Their plays often celebrate time's capability to mend broken relationships and rectify cycles of trauma-- which is what drove them to write STUY OR DIE which they are workshopping through the Intensive :). If you wanna check out their work, they are a correspondent for Go See A Show-- the off-off Broadway podcast, and monthly writer at Living Radio at Under St. Marks. Check out their clanky Weebly website at jasontwang.weebly.com for the full list of ~stuff~, and hit Jason up if you want your show covered for the podcast-- or just want to chat! yayyyyyyy
Rachel Hynes
Bound by no rules, Rachel devises collaborative, innovative performances and helps others develop new works as a director, actor, teacher, playwright and movement consultant. Her work ping-pongs between the sacred and the profane, creating spaces where audiences can acknowledge their own wounding and healing through self-reflection, empowerment and laughter. Her creations include physical, experimental and interactive performances about tigers, zombies, scars and the permeability of memory, as well as site-specific performances featured in Art All Night DC and Supernova Performance Art Festival. Her devised adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women was a part of Washington DC’s Women’s Voices Festival. Rachel has been an Artistic Associate with banished? productions, a Producing Playwright with the second cohort of Washington DC’s premiere playwrights collective, The Welders, and most recently, was head of the theatre program at Limestone University. From 2006-2011, Rachel was the Co-Artistic Director of avant garde performance group, Helsinki Syndrome, performing in On the Boards Northwest New Works Festival, the Henry Art Gallery, Bumbershoot Arts Festival, Annex Theatre (Seattle), Hand2Mouth’s Risk/Reward Series (Portland), Camden People’s Theatre SPRINT Festival (London) and had two residencies at Richard Forman’s Ontological-Hysteric Incubator (NYC). Rachel earned her MFA in Lecoq Based Actor Created Theatre from Naropa University at the London International School for the Arts (LISPA). She has been awarded seven Artist’s Fellowships by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and is a winner of the Larry Neal Award for Dramatic Writing. She is currently co-lead of theatre/experience company, Joy and Pang Productions.
Madi Fabber
(she/her) is a playwright, dramaturg, and arts administrator based in NYC. Her style has been deemed as "Florida Gothic," inspired by her experiences growing up all around the American Southeast. As a writer, she's interested in exploring gender, queerness, and things that go bump in the night. As an arts administrator, she IS the thing that goes bump in the night. Answer your emails. An honors graduate of Harvard College's English and Theater, Dance, & Media departments, Madi's full-length thesis play, Dressed In White and Covered in Blood received a grade of magna cum laude. Madi's work has been featured in the Harvard Playwrights Festival, Gone In 60 Seconds Festival, and Literature Today.
Dillon Chitto
is a Mississippi Choctaw, Laguna, and Isleta Pueblo playwright from Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, he learned the importance of art, culture, and traditions from his family, and members of his community. In his playwriting, he connects these ideas using storytelling techniques learned throughout his life. He currently lives in Chicago, Illinois. In the past, Dillon has worked with Native Voices, AlterTheater Ensemble, Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Arena Stage, Goodman Theatre, Sundance Institute, and was the Literary Manager for BoHo Theatre.
Marella Martin Koch
is a playwright and director whose work explores agency and its absence. Her play Friend Animals has been developed with Midnight Oil Collective, The Rally Cat, and The Workshop Theater, showcased at the Yale Innovation Summit, and will receive a production at Quinnipiac University in 2024. Other writing for the stage includes Night (Semi-Finalist, Little Black Dress INK's ONSTAGE Festival; Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum SeedlingsFest), How Love Feels (Barrington Stage Company, Common Man Musicals, NAAP: Discover New Musicals), 5th Grade Prison Ship (Prospect Theater Company Musical Theater Lab), Circle of Friends (PianoFight 2.0 at Theatre Asylum), The Salamander Project (Max 10 at The Electric Lodge), and Adam & Eve (The Duplex, The Kraine Theater, and residencies at Access Theater and Catwalk Institute). She recently directed the fully-immersive, collaboratively-authored, antiracist, anticapitalist, feminist experience known as Ragercize: Your Aerobic Theatrical Catharsis! at Sunlight Studios. BA, UC Berkeley. MFA, NYU/Tisch