The 2006 - 2007 New New Dramatists Resident Playwrights

Tanya Barfield

Tanya Barfield’s plays include Blue Door, Dent, The Quick, The Houdini Act, 121º West and Pecan Tan. She has workshopped her plays at the Sundance Theatre Lab, New York Stage & Film, New York Theatre Workshop and Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Women’s Playwright Festival. Short plays produced: Medallion (Women’s Project/Antigone Project), Foul Play (Royal Court Theatre, Cultural Center Bank of Brazil), Of Girl & Wolf and Wanting North (Guthrie Theatre Lab, published in Best 10-Minute Plays of 2003) and Defacing Patriotic Property (Humana Festival). She wrote the book for the Theatreworks/USA musical, Civil War: The First Black Regiment. She was a recipient of the 2003 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, 2005 Honorable Mention for the Kesselring Prize for Drama, a 2006 Lark Play Development/NYSCA grant and she has twice been a finalist for the Princess Grace Award. Tanya has been commissioned by the Center Theatre Group, Geva Theatre and South Coast Repertory. Her play, Blue Door, will premiere at South Coast Repertory and Playwrights Horizons in 2006, and will be produced in 2007 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Adam Bock’s plays include Swimming in the Shallows, Five Flights, The Typographer’s Dream, Thursday, The Shaker Chair, The Thugs, The Drunken City and The Receptionist, with productions in the States, Canada and Britain. Five Flights won the Glickman Award, was nominated for the ATCA and Osborn Awards and moved to New York’s Rattlestick Theatre. Swimming won three BATCC Awards, a Clauder and was nominated for the Weissberger. In 2005, Swimming was produced by New York’s Second Stage. The sold-out production was called “a screwy little jewel” by The New York Times, named Top Ten by Time Out New York, featured on the cover of American Theatre magazine, nominated for a GLAAD Media Award and published in the Best Plays of 2005. Encore Theater’s production of Typographer was named Top Ten by The San Francisco Chronicle and remounted in Berkeley; The Shaker Chair was at the Humana Festival in 2005 and published by DPS; and The Audience, a musical Adam helped Jack Cummings III create, was nominated for three Drama Desk Awards. 3 Guys and a Brenda, a ten-minute play that started at The 24-Hour Plays, won the Heinemann Award and was produced at Humana. His newest play, The Receptionist, was workshopped at Perry-Mansfield and the O’Neill Conference in Summer 2006. Bock is an artistic associate at Shotgun Players and Encore Theater, and a member of MCC’s Writers Coalition, and has received commissions from Playwrights Horizons, the Kitchen Theater, and Salt Lake Acting Company. The Thugs will be produced by Soho Rep in NYC in fall 2006.

Sheila Callaghan

Sheila Callaghan’s plays have been produced and developed with Soho Rep, Playwrights Horizons, South Coast Repertory, Clubbed Thumb, The Lark, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, New Georges, Moving Arts, and Crowded Fire, among others. Sheila is the recipient of a 2000 Princess Grace Award for emerging artists, a 2001 LA Weekly Award for Best One-Act, a 2001-02 Jerome Fellowship from the Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis, a 2002 Chesley Prize for Lesbian Playwriting, a 2003 MacDowell Residency, and a 2004 NYFA grant. Her plays have been produced internationally in New Zealand, Norway, and the Czech Republic. She has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, South Coast Repertory, and EST/Sloan. Her full-length plays include Scab, The Hunger Waltz, Crawl Fade to White, Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake), We Are Not These Hands, Dead City, Lascivious Something and Kate Crackernuts. Several of her plays are published by Playscripts, Inc. She has taught playwriting at The University of Rochester, Spalding University, The College of New Jersey, and Florida State University. Sheila is a member of the Obie-winning playwright’s organization 13P. She is also the lead vocalist of the electro-pop ensemble If I Told Napoleon.

Kirsten Greenidge

Kirsten Greenidge was recently the NEA/TCG playwright-in-residence at Woolly Mammoth where she wrote The Curious Walk of the Salamander. Kirsten’s work includes Rust (Magic 2007), Proclivities (Guthrie BFA Project), At Sunday Dinner and The Interpretation of Being (Point of Revue at Mixed Blood), Bossa Nova, On Wonder Bread and Orange Juice, (McCarter Shorts), 103 Within the Veil (CompanyOne, 2005 Independent Reviewers of New England Award for Best New Play), The Gibson Girl (Moxie), Hinges Keep a City: Neighborhood Stories (Huntington); Sans-Culottes in the Promised Land, (Humana); Fast and Loose: An Ethical Collaboration (Humana); Familiar (Kennedy Center’s Lorraine Hansberry Award); and Devil Must Be Deep (New Georges). Kirsten enjoyed development experiences at The Magic, P73, Madison Rep, Hourglass, Playwrights Horizons, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Sundance/Ucross, A.S.K. and The O’Neill. She is working on commissions for South Coast Rep, CompanyOne, Cardinal Stage, and the Kennedy Center/White House Historical Society. Kirsten attended Wesleyan University and The Playwright’s Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Jason Grote

Jason Grote’s work has been presented and/or developed with The 24-Hour Plays, The 92nd Street Y’s Makor/Steinhardt Center, Baltimore Center Stage, The Bloomington Playwrights Project, The Brick, Circle X, Clubbed Thumb, Denver Center Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Flea, HERE, The Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab, Manhattan Ensemble Theater, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The NY International Fringe Festival, The O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference, P73, The Playwrights’ Center, Salvage Vanguard, Sanctuary, Soho Rep, Studio 42, Theatre of NOTE, The Williamstown Theater Festival workshop, and The Working Theater, and published in The Back Stage Book of New American Short Plays 2005 (edited by Craig Lucas). His play, Hamilton Township, will be presented in Slovenia in December 2006, and his play, 1001, will premiere at Denver Center Theater in January 2007. Honors include a nomination for the 2007 Kesselring Prize; an NEA grant via Soho Rep; a Sloan Commission from Ensemble Studio Theatre; The P73 Playwriting Fellowship; and multiple-year finalist for The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, PlayLabs, and The Princess Grace Award. He is co-chair of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and theatre co-editor of The Brooklyn Rail, and has an MFA from NYU. Visit him at jasongrote.com.

Carson Kreitzer

Carson Kreitzer’s The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer won the Rosenthal New Play Prize, the American Theatre Critics’ Steinberg Citation, the Stavis Award, and is published in Smith and Kraus’ New Playwrights: Best Plays of 2004. Self Defense or Death of Some Salesmen has been produced in Providence, Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and is published by Playscripts and in Smith and Kraus’ Women Playwrights: Best Plays of 2002. Her play, The Slow Drag, a jazz cabaret about a woman who passed as a man to play the music she loved, enjoyed a three-month run at the Whitehall Theater in London’s West End in 1997/98, following a run in London’s Fringe and an original Off-Broadway production at The American Place Theatre in 1996. Other work includes Valerie Shoots Andy, Heroin/E (Keep Us Quiet), Freakshow, Dead Wait and Take My Breath Away, featured in BAM’s 1997 Next Wave Festival. Ms. Kreitzer holds a degree in Theater and Literature from Yale University, an M.F.A. in Writing from the Michener Center, U.T. Austin, and has received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the NEA, TCG, and the Jerome and McKnight Foundations. She is an associated artist with Clubbed Thumb, and a member of the Workhaus Collective, The Playwrights’ Center and the Dramatists Guild.

Young Jean Lee

Young Jean Lee has directed her plays at P.S. 122 (Pullman, WA), Soho Rep (The Appeal), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals). She has worked with Radiohole (None of It) and performed with the National Theater of the United States of America (What’s That On My Head?!?). She is a member of 13P, a resident artist at HERE Arts Center and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), and has an M.F.A. from Mac Wellman’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Her plays have been published in New Downtown Now (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), an anthology edited by Mac Wellman and herself, and in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French, 2006). She is the 2006 recipient of grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Rockefeller MAP Foundation, and the Greenwall Foundation. She will direct Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven at HERE Arts Center from September 22-October 15, 2006 and at the Walker Art Center from January 18-20, 2007. She will present Pullman, WA at Glej Teater in Slovenia in December 2007 and will direct her new play, Church, at BAX and P.S. 122 in 2007.

Chiori Miyagawa

Chiori Miyagawa travels in time and space in her life and in her plays. She interviewed men on death row in Huntsville, TX (Broken Morning, supported by TCG’s Extended Collaboration Grant, Dallas Theater Center); traveled to Bath, England, where the first recognized woman astronomer lived in the 18th century (Comet Hunter, supported by EST/Alfred P. Sloan commission); and explored life in Chekhov’s Russia (Leaving Eden, supported by The Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University). In 1998, she was granted a private audience with The Dalai Lama. Her deepest inspiration comes from the forty-five minutes she spent with His Holiness in Dharamsala, India. Chiori’s other plays include America Dreaming (Vineyard Theatre, directed by Michael Mayer, published in Global Foreigners); Nothing Forever (published in Positive/Negative Women) and Yesterday’s Window (published in Take Ten) both at New York Theatre Workshop, directed by Karin Coonrod; Woman Killer (Crossing Jamaica Avenue in co-production with HERE, published in Plays and Playwrights 2002), Jamaica Avenue (New York International Fringe Festival, published in Tokens? The NYC Asian American Experiences on Stage), Firedance (Voice & Vision), Antigone’s Red (published in Take Ten II), and Red Again/Antigone Project (Women’s Project). She has been awarded many grants and fellowships including the New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, McKnight Playwriting Fellowship, Van Lier Playwriting Fellowship, and Asian Cultural Council Fellowship. Chiori lives in Manhattan with her husband, visual artist Hap Tivey, and serves on the board of ART/New York.