This upcoming season, the cell has committed to 28 new projects with over 53 resident artists for the 2025/2026 cycle. The cell’s Artist-in-Residence Program is for playwrights, composers, theatrical designers, choreographers, and interdisciplinary artists who are developing new and experimental work.
Our 2025/2026 cohort includes: Gelsey Bell, é boylan, Patti Bradshaw, Josh Brown, Dan Caffrey, Camille Cooper, Dan Daly, Kallan Dana, Alexa Derman, Steph Del Rosso, Anne DeMelo, Matt Dickson, Stephen M. Eckert, Zachariah Ezer, Dan Giles, Daniela Garcia-Arce, Samuel Golland, Mackenna Goodrich, Annaporva Green, Dante Green, Gabby Gubitosi, Lauren Holmes, Mya Ison, Jesse Itskowitz, Kedian Keohan, Kenneth Keng, Noah Latty, Lee LeBreton, Zoe Lesser, Ying Ying Li, Lauren Holmes, Daniel Holzman, Noah Latty, Joonas Lemetyinen, Sam Mueller, Honor Molloy, Robert Norman, Caitlin Ryan O’Connell, Jessica O’Hara-Baker, Alexandra Palocz, Liz Peterson, Drew Praskovich, Maleek Rae, Utkarsh Rajawat, Joe Rivera, Dominique Rider, Francesca Sabel, Stephen Santa, Brian Joél Sanchez, Griffin Stanton-Ameisen, Will Steinberger, Dina Vovsi, and Christopher Williams
Grantees receive a $1000-$5000 stipend and a 1 - 5 week space grant at the cell, a multi-purpose art venue in the heart of Chelsea. The staff at the cell offers each AIR a suite of services.
This includes creative development, dramaturgy, casting assistance, technical support to execute theatrical designs, administrative services, 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship, marketing, ticketing, videography, and photographic documentation.
You can learn more about our resident artists and their projects below!
The Body of Mangoes (Deliver Us to Evil)
a new dance piece by Daniela Garcia-Arce and Gabby Gubitosi
Workshop Presentation | July 2025
The Body of Mangoes (Deliver Us to Evil) investigates the influence of colonization on Mexican and Filipino cultures through contemporary dance, utilizing prayer, rituals, vocalizing, eating, and music.
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Daniela Garcia-Arce (she/her) and Gabby Gubitosi (he/him) are New York City based dance artists and educators whose work investigates the brown queer experience. They have been collaborating professionally since 2022. They have presented their piece The Body of Mangoes (Deliver us to Evil) at Waxworks at Triskelion Arts in 2023, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church in 2024, and most recently at Parkside Lounge for WetSpot NYC. In December of 2024 they premiered their newest work, Dreams and Decay, for THAT SHOW at Index. Most recently they participated in Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company’s STUDIO TO STAGE residency program and are current artists in residence for the cell theater’s 2025-2026 season. They are also both Teaching Artists for New York City Ballet’s education department, working with New York City public school students teaching creative movement and ballet curriculums through a diverse and accessible lens.
ARBORLOGUES
a botanical recital performed for one tree by Dan Daly
text by Lee LeBreton
Workshop Presentation | August 2025
Arborlogues: A Botanical Recital Performed for One Tree is a one-person play where you are the performer and a single tree is your audience. Performed in the backyard of the cell, the 15-minute play takes place within a specially built red curtain theater. After receiving the bound script from the stage manager, you are left alone with your audience. The script leads you through a series of stories, prompts, and actions related to this tree, this location, and yourself.
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Dan Daly (Lead Artist) is a Hudson Valley based scenic designer and visual artist, specializing in site-specific and immersive work. Dan’s design work has been seen Off-Broadway with the immersive play Tammany Hall at SoHo Playhouse, at the Under the Radar Festival at The Public, at South by Southwest with Third Rail Project’s site-specific work Yours To Lose, at RuPaul’s Drag Con where he designs the booth for Monét X Change, and at the Barn Arts Collective in Southwest Harbor, Maine where he built an inflatable theater for performance events. Dan designed the second ever production of Nico Muhly’s opera Dark Sisters at Pittsburgh Opera, the first full production of Cassandra Rosebeetle and JL Marlor’s opera The Final Veil at the Cell Theatre, and multiple productions with Odyssey Opera in Boston. Additional New York design credits include the 2021 and 2023 Criminal Queerness Festival (National Queer Theater), Toe Pick and Brideshead Obliterated (Dixon Place), and Arborlogues: A Botanical Recital Performed for One Tree, a play created for one specific tree in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Dan is a proud member of the National Queer Theater Collective, teaches theater design at SUNY New Paltz, is a resident artist at Nancy Manocherian's the cell theatre, and runs the experimental theater company OFO Theater.
Lee LeBreton (Text) is a queer, trans experimental theatre-maker and performance artist from the American South, now based in Brooklyn, New York. With over ten years of experience in the arts, Lee’s work spans new and classical plays, musicals, film, commercials, video, performance art, interactive installations, voiceover, dramaturgy, digital games, producing, playwriting, teaching, and more. They use both he/him and they/them pronouns.Lee is a core member of the New York Neo-Futurists, where he performs, writes, and teaches year-round. He has spoken at schools and conferences across the U.S. on topics related to performance, queerness, and play. His acting credits include work with organizations such as Planned Parenthood, It Gets Better, Arena Stage, Trinity Rep, American Theatre Wing, Edinburgh Fringe, Intiman Theatre Festival, the San Francisco Neo-Futurists, Fault Line Theatre, the Brick, Broken Ghost Immersives, UglyRhino, Woodshed Collective, the Lark, the Bushwick Starr, the Drama League, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, and numerous independent films. He has also performed at venues including Largo (Los Angeles), C’Mon Everybody, Venus in Fur, and Metropolitan (Brooklyn). As a voiceover artist, Lee has worked with Dipsea, the Neo-Futurists’ podcast Hit Play, The Strange Case of Starship Iris, and Night Vale Presents. He is the voice of Michael Witten in Season 3 of Within the Wires, for which he received a 2019 Audio Verse Award. Lee performs regularly with The Feast, a Seattle-based, living-wage theatre ensemble described by The Seattle Times as producing "transcendently gorgeous" work. Their production of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending was named one of the best of the year. Lee writes new plays, musicals, and immersive shows. His collaborators, clients, and presenters include Virgin Voyages, ART/NY, Skidmore College, the New Ohio, the Brick, Dixon Place, AntiMatter Collective, Caveat, Stage74, Powerhouse Theatre, and the San Francisco Neo-Futurists. His immersive work has been featured in the inaugural Future of Storytelling festival in NYC, and he was a participant in Northeastern University’s 2018 immersive creator summit, Analog Holodeck. As an educator, Lee teaches writing through the New York Neo-Futurists and has led workshops for adults in NYC and for students at Wellesley College, Grinnell College, and Babson College. His dramaturgical work has brought him to the Kennedy Center and the New Harmony Project. From 2014 to 2018, he served as a script reader for Roundabout Theatre Company and was a 2010 LMDA Dramaturgy Fellow. Lee has given talks on queerness, performance, and play at PodX, McNally Jackson, and Skidmore College. He has received funding from the ART/NY Bel Geddes Fund and the City Artist Corps. He studied devised theatre with Elevator Repair Service and is a certified Sexual Harassment Prevention trainer through ART/NY. He also works as a standardized patient at Weill Cornell School of Medicine.Originally from near Dallas, Texas, Lee holds an MFA in Acting from Brown/Trinity Rep and a BS in Theatre Studies with a minor in Graphic Design from the University of Evansville. As an undergraduate, he also studied at Harlaxton College in England, focusing on Shakespeare and British history.
CEREMONIES FOR ALLIGATOR BAIT (OR GUTTAH)
a new play by Maleek Rae
Workshop Presentation | September 2025
Fusing spoken word, poetry and rap, this new play takes audiences between present day and 1970’s Detroit where a group of characters navigate the challenges of breaking generational curses while aiming to create a brighter future. Exploring the complexities of identity, family, and heritage, Ceremonies for Alligator Bait decolonizes the traditional theatrical experience, inviting audiences to celebrate the power of storytelling across cultures and generations.
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Maleek Rae (Playwright) is a gender-free multidisciplinary chain breaker from the Eastside of Detroit, MI, who births creative baptisms in a pursuit to decolonize theatrical experiences. Their work is rooted in the stories of the concrete—the tales of the mud, the earth, and the people who were birthed and bloomed in darkness. Maleek’s creative practice centers around the narratives of those from the gutter, or as they refer to it in their work, the Guttah. A graduate of the SUNY Purchase BFA acting conservatory, Maleek’s work as an actor spans network television, New York City stages, national commercials, video games, and original multimedia creations. Their most recent play, Ceremonies for Alligator Bait (or Guttah), has received developmental support from The Tank and SPACE on Ryder Farm (Greenhouse Residency). Other plays include Ghetto Alchemy: A Lunchroom Survival Guide and Love Birds: or how to fix a broken heart in a day. Maleek is a member of the LIT Council at The Tank, a 2025 Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow, a 2024 Gatekeeper Collective Learning to Love Fellow, a 2023–24 Institute Fellow with Target Margin Theatre, a 2024 EMERGE cohort member at Brooklyn Art Exchange, and a 2024 Space Grant Resident at BAX. Outside of their theatrical work, Maleek channels their pen into lyrical flows and hard-hitting punchlines, which can be heard on all streaming platforms. All glory be to God—work hard and pray harder.
ADJUNCTS
a new play by Steph Del Rosso
directed by Caitlyn Ryan O’Connell
Reading | October 2025
Claudine and Sam are burnt-out, underpaid teachers at a private arts college in New York who become fast friends when they decide to organize their co-workers. But internal divides and manipulative tactics from management threaten to destroy their path to lasting change. A dark comedy about solidarity, academia, and the gig economy.
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Steph Del Rosso is a playwright, fiction writer, screenwriter, and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow, a Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center, and a winner of the Steinberg Playwright Award and the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Award. Her plays have been produced nationally and internationally and include Adjuncts, Precarious (Mosaic Theater, Spring 2026), 53% Of (Second Stage Theater), The Gradient (The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis), Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill Fill (The Flea), Damage Control, and more. They are published by Concord Theatricals and Dramatists Play Services. Steph is a former Theater Masters Visionary Playwright and an alum of the Shank Playwriting Fellowship at The Public, the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, Clubbed Thumb’s Early Career Writers’ Group, and the New Georges Audrey Residency. Her work has received fellowships, development, and support from the Bogliasco Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, La Jolla Playhouse, Ojai Playwrights’ Conference, The Kennedy Center, Alliance Theatre, Studio Theatre, and others. She is the winner of the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Steph received her MFA from UC-San Diego and currently teaches Playwriting to middle and high school students at the Saint Ann’s School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.
Caitlin Ryan O’Connell is a theater director and teaching artist based in Brooklyn. She has directed and developed work at Little Island, Clubbed Thumb, The Bushwick Starr, The Public, Ars Nova, The Lark, Roundabout, New Georges, The Hearth, Fault Line Theatre, Montana Repertory Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and The Denver Center. In 2018, Caitlin co-created a program with Rachel Kauder Nalebuff supported by The Bushwick Starr. She teaches theater classes in senior centers throughout Bushwick and mentors artists who join the program as co-teachers. She has also taught at NYU's Playwrights Horizons Theater School, The New School, Wellesley College, Powerhouse Theater Training Company, The National Theatre Institute, and with the International Theatre Project in Rwanda. Caitlin is New Georges affiliated artist, and a former t. She is a former Clubbed Thumb directing fellow, Actors Theatre directing apprentice, New Georges Jam member, and alum of Lincoln Center Theater's Directors Lab 2017. BA Wellesley College, MFA Brown University.
BUT TODAY I AM FINE
a new play by Ying Ying Li
directed by Jessica O’Hara-Baker
Reading | September 2025
“A coming-of-age story of my motherhood, told in a series of vignettes which are In turns poignant and unserious, but always a little bit... dark.”
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Ying Ying Li (Playwright) was born in Beijing and grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She came to America to attend Yale Law School and practiced corporate law in NYC before restarting her life as a writer and performer. She has been a Colt Coeur Resident Artist (2024-2025), a NYTW 2050 Artistic Fellow (2023-2024), and a member of The Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group (2020-2023), The Tank’s Playwrights Group, The Tank’s TV Writers Group, Harvardwood’s TV Writers Group, and Hot Buffet Sketch Comedy Group. She is currently a member of the Parent/Caregiver Playwrights Group. Full-length plays include This Could Be You (Spotlight Series at The Public, NYTW workshop), Dance Moms (Premiere Play Festival semi-finalist, NEA grant recipient), and the solo show But Today I am Fine (NYTW workshop). Her work has been commissioned by Project Y, and developed or seen at The Public, NYTW, The Tank, Boomerang Theatre, Rule of 7x7, Decent Company, Yes Noise, The Brick, and on The Highline (so many helicopters, lesson learned). Her humor writing and videos have appeared in publications such as the NYT, Buzzfeed, Wired, MSN, Lifehacker, Men’s Health, and Mental Floss. She has two delicious small children.
Jessica O’Hara-Baker is a New York and Copenhagen-based theatre and filmmaker. She has a background in new theatre-in-development as director, actor, and dramaturg, and has worked on new projects at The Public, New York Theatre Workshop, Second Stage, LAByrinth, EST, The Lark (RIP!), Signature, Drama League, Primary Stages, Cherry Lane, Prospect Theater, Fresh Ground Pepper, and Copenhagen World Pride, among others. Jessica recently co-dramaturged Amita Sharma’s Birth of a Mother at The Public’s EWG Spotlight Series. As an actor, she was recently nominated for a Breakthrough Performance of 2024 Award for her portrayal of Aphra Behn in Copenhagen Shakespeare Company’s production of Or,. She executive produces and stars in the upcoming short film Hello Again, directed by 2022 Sundance director Lena Hudson and written by Anna Ziegler, for her filmmaking collective, Burn it Down. She is currently developing a bilingual animated comedy series with music (think irreverent takedown of American capitalism + glitter!). jessicaoharabaker.com
SNOWBIRDS
a new play by Lauren Holmes
directed by Will Steinberger
Reading | September 2025
Recent retirees Tom and Joan have hit the road in their new RV, ready to experience the next phase of their lives. When cash gets tight, they pick up work in a warehouse. What happens when our working lives never end?
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Lauren Holmes (Playwright) is a playwright and producer from Dedham, Massachusetts. She’s the recipient of the 2024 Princess Grace Award in Playwriting/New Dramatists Residency, a Venturous Playwrights Fellowship 2025 nomination, and a 2024 Woodward Residency. She recently adapted Olga Ravn’s novel The Employees for a production at Theaterlab. Her work has been developed and performed at Theaterlab, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Pace University, and The Brick. Lauren’s a finalist for the Bushwick Starr Reading Series, the Henley Rose Playwright Competition for Women, and the Risk Theatre Prize, and a semi-finalist for the Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship, The Terrence McNally Fellowship, The Next Forever Residency, The Civilians R&D Lab, and WP Lab. Before becoming a playwright, Lauren worked on political campaigns, in the private sector, and for the United Nations in Italy and New York. She draws on these experiences to write dark, comic plays about work, class, families of happenstance, and seekers of hidden knowledge. They’re grounded in realism, but full of ghosts, invisible dogs, aliens, and other spirits. MFA in playwriting from Hunter College. Founding member of The Omnivores. laurenholm.es
Will Steinberger (Director) is a Drama League Award nominated director and producer. He has directed and developed new plays at New York Theatre Workshop, New York Stage and Film, Clubbed Thumb, New Dramatists, Hartford Stage, the Drama League, Berkshire Theatre Group, Powerhouse Theater, Valdez Theater Conference, The Brick, the Wilma, and InterAct. He recently directed Johnny G. Lloyd’s birthday birthday birthday at The Tank and Andrea Stolowitz’s The Berlin Diaries at 59E59 featuring David Greenspan, produced in association with The New Group. Other productions include Han Van Sciver’s Happy Birthday, Han (JACK), Gina Femia’s meet you at the Galaxy Diner. (The Tank and New Light Theatre Project), Charles Gershman’s Oedipus 2.0.2.0 (All For One f/ Eddie Cooper; Drama League nom), and Johnny G. Lloyd’s Or, an Astronaut Play (The Tank and InVersion Theatre, of which he is a proud co-founder). Will is a former artist in residence at New York Stage and Film and has been a guest speaker or artist at the Yale School of Drama, Brown University, University of California – San Diego, Syracuse University, UT – Austin, Vassar College, Neumann University, and Hunter College. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, American Theatre magazine, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Forward, WHYY, Philadelphia Weekly, and Philadelphia Magazine. Member, LCT Directors Lab. Finalist, National Directors Fellowship. wsteinberger.com
TRANSGRESSIONS
A new play by Kallan Dana
directed by Zoe Lesser
Reading | October 2025
Willow's mother disappears again and again and again and again and again and again.
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Kallan Dana (Playwright) has developed or presented work with Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theatre Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and 2025 Audrey Resident, and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at the Tank. She received the 2025 National Theatre Conference Paul Green Award. MFA: Northwestern University.
Zoe Lesser (Director) is a director and choreographer, working across theater, opera, and immersive experiences. Her work ranges from site-specific, intimate, moments with actors to large-scale, multidisciplinary works. Recent directing credits include a workshop production of the new musical, The Brass Teapot (Firefly Theatre Group), the southwestern premiere of Heroes of the Fourth Turning (New Mexico Actors Lab), and a body-horror, multimedia, re-imagining of Agnes of God (The Morgan-Wixson). Recent assistant directing credits include world premieres at Denver Center Theatre Company and La Jolla Playhouse, as well as productions at Aspen Music Festival, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and Chicago Opera Theater. She is a co-founder of The Exodus Ensemble, an immersive experience company in Santa Fe, NM.
OLIVES
a new play by Daniel Holzman
directed by Francesca Sabel
Reading | October 2025
Miriam is afraid there isn't going to be a future. David is afraid of everything. Then the bodybuilder arrives.
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Daniel Holzman is a playwright and artist from San Francisco. His work has been produced and supported by The New York Foundation for the Arts, Clubbed Thumb, The Brick, The Tank, Fresh Ground Pepper, The Workshop Theater and more. Devious invitations to audiences and artists alike, his plays take the form of strange-intimate-epics, slippery in tone, often lonely, funny, and frightening in the same breath. He is a 2023 Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group member, a 2023 Eugene O’Neill NPC Finalist, and has collaborated across mediums with artists such as David Greenspan, Lucy Sexton, Alex Tatarsky, Noah Latty and his sister Neena, who illustrates his plays. Recent work includes: Berlindia! (The Tank), Middle School Play (The Brick Aux), OLIVES (Clubbed Thumb ECWG), Me & Who (O'Neill Finalist), and Nose Play (Dixon Place). BFA: NYU MFA Candidate: Brooklyn College.
Francesca Sabel is a Brooklyn-based director specializing in new play development. Her work aims to be 'easy to enter and difficult to leave,' emphasizing off-kilter rhythms, uncanny architectures, and structural surprise. In addition to directing new work at venues including the Atlantic Theater Company, Classic Stage Company, Clubbed Thumb, and Ars Nova’s ANT Fest, she has worked as assistant and associate (mostly on world premieres) to directors like Knud Adams, Steve Broadnax, Neil Pepe, Sam Pinkleton and Caitlin Sullivan. She is an Artist in Residence at the Roundabout Directors Group, a member of the Tank Artists' Group for playwrights and directors, and an alum of 24 Hour Plays: Nationals. Previously, she led casting and community engagement as Studio Theatre’s Creative Producer. BA: Brown University.
THE BODY FILTERS
a new play by Greg T. Nanni
directed by Griffin Stanton-Ameisen
Ticketed Performance | November 2025
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Greg T. Nanni is a playwright, comic book writer, dramaturg, educator, solo show performer, and former Philadelphian now living in the NYC area. He was a member of Witherspoon Circle, Passage Play Lab, Cut/Edge Collective, a former PDC Playwright in Residence at Plays & Players, and the former Literary Manager of the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium. He is the Co-Founder of the PDC Playwrights' Happy Hour, and formerly served as President on the board of the Philadelphia Dramatists’ Center. As a dramaturg, he was the former Literary Manager of the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, and assisted Kristina Wong and Aaron Malkin on the inaugural production of KRISTINA WONG, SWEATSHOP OVERLORD (New York Theatre Workshop). As an educator, he has worked with Two River Theater, Horizon Theatre Company, and with high schools around the country. His One Act plays have been featured in Festivals and Readings throughout the Greater Philadelphia Area, and have been produced nation-wide. Solo Shows: FAT and THE DEPRESSION SHOW! Full length plays include: LONELINESS (CU 2020 Workshop Production), THE BEAR IS HERE (BAPF Semi-Finalist), RAGE (Emerson Stage NewFest New Play Workshop 2022), LOVE (AMONG DREAMERS) (Broadway For All THE HOUSE Debut Lab Production 2023), VACATIONS, and ANGST. He is a graduate of the George Washington University. He is a recipient of the MFA in Playwriting at Columbia University in 2022, where he was awarded the Dean’s Fellowship. gregnanni.com
Griffin Stanton-Ameisen (he/him) is a Philly area-born, NYC-based actor, writer, filmmaker and producer. Proud member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA. Most recently, he performed in New Circle Theatre Company’s START THEN NEXT, as well as in Die-Cast’s SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival. Select theatrical credits: THE (CURIOUS CASE OF THE) WATSON INTELLIGENCE (Azuka Theatre), HAMLET (Delaware Shakespeare), GINT (Egopo Classic Theatre), JULIUS CAESAR (Greenbrier Valley Theatre Company), PENELOPE (Inis Nua Theatre), THE NETHER (InterAct Theatre), CYMBELINE & LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST (Revolution Shakespeare), and ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL (Shakespeare on the Sound). He is the founding Artistic Director of the Philadelphia-based Shakespeare company Revolution Shakespeare. He’s currently a professor at St. Francis College in Downtown Brooklyn. Having worked on several commercials for TV and the web, he’s known for playing internet sensation Yawn Yawnson. He created his one man game night theatrical experience FREE SPACE, which has performed in various locations in the tri-state area, and will show this August at The Bushwick Starr. Next, he’s on the producing team of Hapa Media’s feature film KATE, filming this summer in NYC. Hapa-media.com. More info at www.griffinsa.com. @thegriffinsa
SO SUBLIME
a new play by Alexa Derman
Reading | December 2025
A new play about the uneasy erotics of feeling in fiction.
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Alexa Derman is a Brooklyn-based playwright and screenwriter. Her plays have been developed by the Playwrights Realm, Ars Nova, NYTW, Clubbed Thumb, Orchard Project, and the Playwrights Center. Alexa’s plays have been the winner of the Kernodle Prize, the Chesley/Bumbalo Prize, and the Jewish Plays Project’s National Competition; runner-up for Princess Grace/New Dramatists; honorable mention for the Relentless Award; finalist for the O’Neill; semifinalist for the Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship; and nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn. Alexa is an alum of the Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group, the Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship, and the Lehman-Engels Librettist Workshop; she is a New Georges Affiliated Artist. She’s attended residencies at Hedgebrook and Ragdale and is under commission from MTC/Sloan and EST/Sloan. As a screenwriter, she has been a staff writer for Netflix and Hulu and is developing multiple film/TV projects. BA from Yale in Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies; MFA from Brown, where she studied under Julia Jarcho. Now that you've met her, you can call her Lex. alexaderman.com
impressive, sincerely
A new play by Robert Norman
directed by Liz Peterson
Reading | December 2025
A struggling American novelist accepts an invitation to a small German town where their work is uniquely celebrated. After a series of misunderstandings with the local book club, it becomes obvious that the translated book they’ve all read bears little resemblance to the original.
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Robert Norman (Playwright) is from San Jose, California and lives in New York. His plays have been developed and performed in New York and the Bay Area at venues including In Among the Young and Healthy at La Mama and All of My Blood at the Corkscrew Theater Festival. His short fiction has appeared in publications including Strange Pulp, Food&, and Sinking City. He is a graduate of NYU’s Dramatic Writing program.
Liz Peterson (Director) is a performer, director, and producer of theatre. Her work has been shown at the OFFTA, Tiger Dublin Fringe Festival, Rhubarb Festival, Incubator Arts Project, Dancemakers, La Poderosa, and the SummerWorks Festival. Through her current research with the collective Divided Attention, she explores how live performance may activate embodied forms of perception in the spectator. Recent collaborations include Sheltered, Urinetown, The Musical (Fisher Center at Bard), A la facon du pays (Theatre Centre, Toronto) and new work in development, Drift. Studies: MFA in theatre directing, Columbia University. lizpeterson.org.
LIGHT + HOUSE
a new play by é boylan
directed by Dante Green
Ticketed Performance | December 2025
Light + House is a love story about love stories, exploring what happens when our dreams express dreams of their own.
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é boylan (they/them) is a New York City based director, creator, and composer developing new work towards trans liberation.Selected honors include: New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center Theater, Musical Theatre Factory Makers Cohort II, 2025-27 Venturous Play List, 2024 MacDowell Fellow, 2022 Jonathan Larson Grant (Finalist), 2022 Relentless Award (Honorable mention), 2023 June Bingham New Playwright Commission (Finalist), 2023/24 NAMT Fall Conferences (Finalist), 2024 Polyphone Artist, 2023 SPACE on Ryder Farm Creative Resident, 2018 & 2021 O’Neill Resident Artist, 2019 Trans Lab Fellow, 2019-20 Manhattan Theatre Club Directing Fellow, 2021 Johnny Mercer Foundation Songwriter, 2021 Prospect Theater Co. MT Lab, 2022 MTFxR Garage Artist, and 2020-22 Roundabout Theatre Co. Directors Group. Graduate of The University of Chicago and National Theater Institute. www.eboylan.com
Dante Green (they/she/he) is a Black, Queer, multi-hyphenate born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, based in Brooklyn. They are an alumnus of The Headlong Performance Institute as well as The University of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Directing, Playwriting, and Producing. Dante is the Founding Artistic Director of the evolving company , which owns a flex rehearsal and performance space in Bushwick. Dante is a member, a former Wesleyan Breaking New Ground Residency Fellow, a Mercury Store Project Lab Director, and the former Emerging Artist Initiative Fellow at . Dante has worked as an Associate Director to former Soho Rep Artistic Director Sarah Benson for the past three years. Together, they have collaborated on TEETH (Playwrights Horizons, New World Stages) and The Welkin (Atlantic Theater Company) both of which garnered Sarah an Obie Award for Theatre Excellence. Dante's work has been seen at Ars Nova, Pig Iron Theater Company, FringeArts, Judson Arts, and other places. Dante has worked internationally with companies such as Internationaal Theatre Amsterdam, Virgin Voyages, Rock Bottom Movement, and others. When Dante isn't working professionally, they are an Instructor of Theater at Wesleyan University, New York University, and Sheridan College in Toronto, Canada. Website: Instagram: @dantemgreen
MY HUSBAND IS GOOD AT DYING
a new play by Drew Praskovich
directed by Stephen Santa
Workshop | January 2026
My Husband is Good at Dying is an audio driven psychological thriller about a Foley Artist working in Los Angeles who must craft the perfect soundscape for the death scene of her late husband’s final film. Jean processes the loss of Boston, her A-lister husband whose career was launched thanks to his signature ability to die on screen. However, Jean becomes obsessed with finding the most realistic sound possible to capture death on screen. As her obsession grows, Jean turns to darker, more violent measures to get closer to perfection.
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Drew Praskovich (he/him) is a Hunter MFA Playwriting candidate (‘27) and 2024 LAMBDA Literary Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices Playwriting Fellow. He had his NYC playwriting debut at AMT Theater with a reading of his play, The Ecstasies. His work has been commissioned by the Omaha Community Playhouse and Jumping Jack Theater. He has a BFA in Cinema Production from Point Park University. He wrote and directed, Seahorse, a short film about a pregnant boy and his fame-obsessed mother that was an official selection at some of the world’s largest LGBTQ+ film festivals and won an Audience Award at NFFTY (‘19). His writing has appeared in them Magazine, TAX Magazine, Qburgh, and more. He is a proud Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts High School Literary Arts graduate and a City Theatre Young Playwrights alum. He likes eggs.
Stephen Santa (he/him) is an award-winning theater director whose work has been seen across the United States and internationally. Stephen is the co-founder and former Artistic Director of Jumping Jack Theater- a children's theater production company that creates original sensory theater experiences for audiences with developmental disabilities and sensory sensitivities. He received the “Stand Out Moment” Award in 2019 from the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society for his work with the company. New York credits include Abduction: A New Musical Comedy for the New York Musical Festival (NYMF), which received a fully produced production in 2021. TEETH (concert presentation) by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson and UNCHARTED: The Music of Anna K. Jacobs, both at the famed Ars Nova Theater. Santa was the assistant director of the Flashdance National Tour, the North American premiere of The Monster in the Hall, and POP! A New Musical choreographed by Billy Porter at CITY Theatre, respectively. His critically acclaimed Dani Girl a New Musical production traveled to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland, where it received multiple five-star reviews. Stephen is an associate member of The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. You can learn more about his work by visiting www.stephensanta.com
CRAWLSPACE
a new play by Mya Ison
directed by Noah Latty
Reading | January 2026
Crawlspace centers Jaime, a Black queer writer navigating her early 20s and her long-term relationship. Jaime is beginning to come into herself as an artist while she is nannying the 11-year-old son of a writer she deeply admires. Things go awry as Jaime begins to make life-altering decisions that affect her selfhood, relationship, and career.
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Mya Ison (Playwright) (she/her) is an actor/playwright based in Brooklyn currently studying as a first-year MFA playwriting candidate at Hunter! Her plays are a relentless search for Black voices in the places where they’ve been erased: in the ordinary, in the future, and in the archive. Selected Playwriting credits: crawlspace (Workshop @ The Flea, 2024), Don’t Let Me Disappear (Liberation Theatre Company Reading/Residency), Laure (Workshop @ NYTW & The Tank, 2023, BAPF Finalist 2023, O’Neill New Playwrights’ Conference Finalist 2024). Selected Acting credits: Little Shop of Horrors (Virginia Theatre Festival), According to Howard (York Theatre Co.), Mary Gets Hers (Workshop @ Playwrights’ Realm), Lorena (Workshop @ NYTW/Dartmouth). BFA, Boston University.
Noah Latty (Director) is a director from Philadelphia, based in Brooklyn, New York. They create work that balances the intimate and strange. Noah served as Assistant Director for A Woman Among Women, by Julia May Jonas at The Bushwick Starr, as well as Pre-Existing Condition by Marin Ireland at The Connelly Theater. Noah directed the NYC premiere of Kinderkrankenhaus by Jesi Bender, which was nominated for Broadway Worlds’ Best New Off-Off Broadway Play in 2023. Their surreal digital play, Still Goes, was a part of the 2022 Exponential Festival. Noah has directed with Coffey Street, the LPAC Festival, and participated in The Mercury Store Directing Lab. NYU BFA.
PROVENANCE
an immersive experience by Alexandra Palocz
Ticketed Event | February 2026
Provenance is an interactive solo piece about feeling in the dark, making meaning out of the world around us, and what it means to belong. In the darkness, you awaken anew and explore your surroundings through touch. As you fit the pieces you find together, a story unfolds around a girl, a mysterious artifact stolen by birds, and a quest to discover its true home. You follow the voice of the girl as she sets out into the unknown, discovering her world together and engaging with questions that emerge through her journey.
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Alexandra Palocz (Creator) is a multidisciplinary storyteller, experience designer, and creative technologist. She recently finished a masters degree at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU Tisch, where she studied interactive narrative, collaborative creativity, and learning through play. She likes speculative fiction, tangible metaphors, and thinking about new storytelling forms.
ADDRESS THE BODY!
a new play by Zachariah Ezer
directed by Dominique Rider
Workshop | February 2026
The two Black members of The Presidential Committee on Slavery and Its Afterlife uncover a conspiracy at the heart of America's most prestigious university.
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Zachariah Ezer is a playwright and an Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis whose work animates theoretical quandaries through theatrical forms. His plays include The Freedom Industry (Playwrights Horizons’ New Works Lab, The Playwrights Center, New York Stage & Film), Address the Body! (The University of Texas at Austin’s UTNT Festival, Kitchen Dog Theater’s New Works Festival, Echo Theater Company’s National Young Playwrights in Residence), The Single Raindrop (The Civilians’ Findings Series, Rorschach Theatre’s Magic in Rough Spaces, The Fade to Black Arts Festival’s Ensemble Theatre Reading Series), Legitime (Fault Line Theatre’s Irons in the Fire), and Black Women in Tech (The Fire This Time Festival, PBS), among others. He is currently a Dramatists Guild Foundation Catalyst Fellow and a member of The St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s Confluence Writers Project. He has received commissions from Manhattan Theatre Club/The Sloan Foundation, Theater J, and American Conservatory Theatre. He has attended residencies at The New Harmony Project, Ryder Farm, and Aunt Karen’s Farm. His work has been published by Concord Theatricals/Samuel French, Smith & Kraus, American Blues Theater, and New World Theatre. He is an alumnus of The University of Texas’ James A. Michener Fellowship, The Civilians’ R&D Group, The Playwrights Center’s Core Apprenticeship, The Liberation Theatre Company’s Writing Residency, Hi-ARTS’ Critical Breaks Residency, Echo Theater Company’s National Young Playwrights in Residence, Town Stages’ Sokoloff Arts Creative Fellowship, BUFU’s EYEDREAM Residency, and Wesleyan University’s Olin Fellowship. Zachariah is also a dramaturg (who has worked with The National Black Theatre, Breaking the Binary, WP Theater, Keen Company, The Workshop Theater, Merde, and foolsFURY), an essayist (published by the University of Texas’ E3W, Gizmodo/io9, HuffPost, and elsewhere), and a performer (in alternative rock band Harper’s Landing). MFA: The University of Texas at Austin. BA: Wesleyan University.
Dominique Rider is a Brooklyn-based director and curator whose work seeks to answer the question: “What is a world unmade by slavery?” while analyzing the layers of anti-blackness that maintain our world. Deploying theatre and performance as tools of Afropessimism, Dominique has developed and staged work with Portland Center Stage, Portland Stage, The Bushwick Starr, The New Group, The Park Avenue Armory, and more. Past fellowships/residencies include The Civilians R&D, The Atlantic, Hi-Arts, The National Black Theatre, TheaterWorks Hartford, NYSAF, BRIC Arts, Roundabout, and NAMT. Dominique is a Vision Resident at Ars Nova, a producer with CLASSIX, and an artist in residence at Duke University.
SOME PEOPLE NEED TO DIE
a new play by Joe Rivera
directed by Jesse Itskowitz
Workshop | March 2026
Two forensic cleaners become pawns in the business of death during an overnight disposal of a kodokushi or “lonely death” in May 2020, and a contractor hires two day laborers for City Burials during a pandemic.
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Joe Rivera (Actor / Playwright) is a multi-disciplinary actor from the San Francisco Bay Area, and a graduate of the Terry Knickerbocker Studio. Theatre: DIRT (Sour Milk); The Trouble with Paradise (Columbia); TRAFFIC (Sour Milk); The Happy Garden of Life (New Ohio); A Modest Proposal (Cherry Lane); Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (SF Playhouse); In the Heights (NYU); The Room in Between (ETW). Film: Misha’s Victory, On the Fire’s Sacred Stream I Write Your Name, and Strictly Liminal.
Jesse Itskowitz (Director) is a multi-disciplinary theater artist based in NYC. Recent credits include: Carmen (Opera Theater Rutgers, video design); BIRTHDAY (Sour Milk, food design); Vile Isle (The Tank NYC, video design); DIRT (Sour Milk, video design). In his spare time he manages a concert hall.
Heather Holmes (Actor) is a performer, writer, and teaching artist from TX, currently based in Brooklyn. Projects include: The Promised Land, Amsterdam Over Het Ij Festival (Netherlands); Covenant, NYTW (workshop); Dreamscapes, LPAC Rough Draft Festival & NYTW (workshop); Flight, Dixon Place; A Modest Proposal, Cherry Lane Theater; The Cake, Shaker Bridge Theatre; Hemispheric Institute's EMERGENYC; Naked Angels Theater Company's Issues Project Lab. Heather has been developing a strange and beautiful performance project about dreams and the way home. She's still learning to dance like no one's watching. MFA, The New School for Drama.
Brian Joél Sanchez (Actor) is a New York native and graduate of Purchase College with a BFA in Acting. He was last seen in Apple TV+’s The Changeling and short film Tomás is Not a Clown. On stage he was previously seen in The Happy Garden of Life at New Ohio Theatre and The Skin of Our Teeth at Theatre For a New Audience. Next up for him is the short film No Glory Just Guts.
Samuel Golland (Video Designer) is a filmmaker and cinematographer based in NY. Cinematography credits include Runaway Train and SPNTD. Directing credits include The Frenchman and Misha’s Victory.
Joonas Lemetyinen (Composer) is a composer and trombonist based out of NYC. He has an eclectic style of writing that spans multiple genres, and stems from whatever is going on in his head that day. Originally from Finland, he has spent the last 12 years in NYC pursuing his passion of music and film. He is a part of several original bands including, Civilians, Flowmigos, and his solo projects YAWU and MAR$HMANGO. Check him out busking in Washington Square Park when the weather’s nice or performing with his various acts around the city.
DUBLIN NOIR
a new play by Honor Molloy
directed by Britt Berke
Reading | March 2026
August 1939. Europe’s boiling up to war. But Ireland’s having none of it. On a day trip to Drogheda, Dubliner Tadgh Steele is captured by a dairy farmer named Murphy and locked in a cowshed. Is Tadgh a poet as he claims or - as Murphy suspects - a Nazi spy? Makes no difference to Murphy’s slop girl Dolly, who falls in love with the handsome stranger and casts him as the hero of a “fil-um in her head.” There’s only one way off the farm.
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Honor Molloy was born in Dublin, so her plays often tell an Irish story: Into The Silver Mouth [of time] (New York City Artists Corps @ The Hunger Memorial Battery Park); Round Room (Best Play – Origin 1st Irish 2020); Crackskull Row (Nancy Manocherian’s the cell; Irish Repertory) and in my heart (International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival); In Pigeon House (Irish Theatre of Chicago); Madame Killer (Clubbed Thumb, NYC; Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney; Lincoln Center / Royal Court Theatre Audrey Skirball-Kenis Playwright Exchange); Maiden Voyages (New Georges, NYC; Royal Court Theatre – workshop); Rehearsing the Granda (Public Theatre / BACA Downtown); Lesbian Cheek (WOW Café). An alumna of NYU’s Graduate Acting Program, Paula Vogel’s Playwriting Workshop at Brown, and New Dramatists – Molloy has received support from the NEA, NYFA (2011, 2002, 1990), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a fellowship year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
Britt Berke (Director) is a director of theatre and film. Her work interrogates love, power, and how these entities are intertwined and revolutionized; often staging delight and spectacle as a means of examining intimacy and taboo. Britt nourishes the development of new work, and reenergizes revivals of plays and musicals. Britt made her Off-Broadway directorial debut with the World Premiere of Becomes a Woman by Betty Smith (author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) at Mint Theater Company. This six-week engagement at New York City Center Stage II was nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best New Off-Broadway Play. Currently: I Don’t Trust Adults, starring Ruby Karp, is playing for six weeks at SoHo Playhouse. Select past projects: Anne Carson’s Antigonick with Torn Out Theater (a company that utilizes selective nudity to promote body autonomy, more via The New Yorker); Springtime (Chautauqua Theater Company); All My Sons (NYU Tisch Grad); Promenade (The Public Theatre’s Fornés Marathon); w a t c h m e (New York Theatre Workshop at Adelphi); DOGS (Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep); Scenes with Girls (TheaterLab); FLASH (a musical fundraiser for NourishNYC); Liberian Girl in Brooklyn (Mabou Mines); Round Room (Origin Theater - Best Director nom); and workshops with La MaMa, New York Classical Theatre, and Cherry Lane Theatre. As an assistant director, Britt has worked with Lileana Blain-Cruz on The Skin of our Teeth (Tony nomination) and JoAnne Akalaitis on Mud / Drowning (Obie Award). She is also proud to have assisted Austin Pendleton, Jade King Carroll, Tamilla Woodard, Gabriel Vega Weissman, Portia Krieger, Katherine Wilkinson, Alice Reagan, Shannon Sindelar, Kara Strait, and Kara Feely. Britt graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University, where she received the the Kenneth Janes Prize in Theatre for Outstanding Intellectual and Artistic Achievement.
SOMEPLACE FUN
composed by Josh Brown
directed by Stephen M. Eckert
Workshop | April 2026
A communal mediation on the process of letting go, following one woman as she slowly decouples herself from the world and her loved ones, one moment at a time.
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Josh Brown (Composer) (@meth.borrison) has a lot of feelings and wants you to feel them too. As an artist and designer working at the intersection of craft, commerce, and connection, he regards the stage as a final bastion of focus in a noisy world. Josh's creativity has been nurtured by Thompson Street Opera, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Strange Trace, Boston Opera Collaborative, The Tank, New Opera West, the International Computer Music Association, Blindspot Collective & La Jolla Playhouse, and the Pittsburgh Opera. Most recently, he was a Composition Fellow with the 2023–2025 cycle of American Opera Projects' Composers & the Voice. BHA, Carnegie Mellon | MS, Northeastern
Stephen M. Eckert (Director) is a New York-based director whose work spans new plays, musicals, operas, and contemporary interpretations of classical texts. Their work has been described as bold, visually arresting, intellectually rigorous, unsettling, austere camp. Stephen is the founding Artistic Director of Promethean Theatre Company in New Orleans, where they directed over a dozen critically acclaimed productions between 2012 and 2017 including notable productions of EQUUS, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and The Flick. Their work has been off broadway at The Players Theatre, featured at The Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival, recognized by the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, and presented internationally at London’s TÊTE À TÊTE new opera festival and the Prague Quadrennial. BFA, Tulane | MFA, Carnegie Mellon
WALKING IRIS
co-created by Patti Bradshaw and Christopher Williams
Workshop | June 2026
Inspired by the botanical wonder of the walking iris (Neomarica gracilis), a host of winged immortals depicted on ancient Greek and Cretan artifacts, as well as the mysterious “Ladies in Blue” fresco found in the Minoan palace of Knossos, Walking Iris is an evening-length puppet/dance work co-created by Patti Bradshaw and Christopher Williams featuring sculptural costumes, objects, and puppets by Wendy Froud, Williams, Bradshaw, and Andrew Jordan set to a soundscape combining live effects by John Dyer with music by Atrium Musicae. The piece as a whole aims to present a meditation on the world of the unseen, the seemingly fleeting nature of time, and the natural cycles of plant life, seasons, and cultures that, like everything, come into being, abide for a time, dissolve, and begin again.
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Patti Bradshaw is a New York City based theater director, puppet artist and performer. She works at the intersection of object theater, puppetry, multimedia design, choreography and physical theater. Inspired by folk art, her works incorporate ordinary, found and constructed objects as well as traditional and innovative puppetry, costume design, video and text. She has devised theater works inspired by writers Robert Walser, Fernando Pessoa, and Franz Kafka (fools in plein air: fermented rain, Disquietude, K and the Way, Next to the Last Poem); painters Marc Chagall and Florine Stettheimer: ,’On the Radar “Acknowledgement, Creative Capital), (Flowers in Space, Garden of Florine: Impending Storms); and photographer Brassai (La Mome Bijoux). She was a co-founder of Pepatian, a visual art and dance collaborative, with Merian Soto and Pepon Osorio, and was a co-founder of the satirical dance company The Butoh Rockettes with Celeste Hastings and Chris Maresca. Her work has been supported by the Jim Henson Foundation, Dixon Place, Harkness Dance Foundation at the 92nd St. Y and the Jerome Foundation. She has been artist in residence at Sarah Lawrence College (Barbara Bray Ketchum Award), at Brooklyn Studios for Dance and artist in residence at the Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island (2025). Her work has been commissioned in various venues and festivals including Dixon Place, New Dance Alliance, Triskelion Arts, and Theater for the New City, (Voice for Vision Festival)., and the Harkness Dance Foundation at the 92nd Street Y. She was a multi-year member of St. Ann's Warehouse Puppet Lab. Her work has been performed in Portugal, Greece and Japan. She has been an adjunct faculty member in the Dance Program at Sarah Lawrence College where she has taught classes in the Dance Program and in the Theater Program and also taught at the New School for Social Research. She has taught puppetry workshops for children at the Lycee Francaise, NYC and Pierrepont School, Greenwich, CT. Bradshaw was a member of Elaine Summers Film and Dance Co, has in recent years performed with K.J. Holmes, Valerie Striar, Renata Celichowska, Chris Maresca, Nadine Helstroffer and Poppo and the GoGo Boys. (performances in NYC, Russia and Denmark).
Christopher Williams A curious “alchemist of theatre" aiming to transcend boundaries between a variety of art forms, Christopher Williams continues to hone a distinctive personal style combining contemporary dance with visual design, music, and/or puppetry to yield multifaceted movement-based performance works in his own mythopoetic genre. Preferring to cast each new project specifically rather than maintaining a set company, he assembles a wide variety of performers that juxtapose many body types, ethnicities, genders, and orientations as well as span many ages, in order to instill each of his works with a varied and inclusive corporeal counterpoint.Williams is particularly interested in expanding the scope and meaning of contemporary dance by exploring the potential relationship of mythology, folklore, historic literature, early and contemporary music, sculptural costume, mask, and a variety of puppetry forms to the gesture of the human body. He notices an intricate harmony between traditionally disparate art forms due to their common potential for movement, and seeks to build polyphonous compositions drawing upon each of their innate properties. In his work, dancers' bodies can move independently or become bases for prosthetic accoutrement, musical vessels, media through which puppets can rouse, and even magical shapeshifters.Fascinated by the ways in which early bands of humans ritually engaged with supernatural denizens of otherworlds, Williams creates works that present his own contemporary queer testimony to a primeval cultural impulse to journey beyond the known realm. By combining highly technical choreographic vocabulary with vivid visual designs and music integral to each new work, Williams aims to revive and reimagine ancient sensibilities of ritual and spectacle in order to immerse a broad public in fantastical new worlds.
SICKBED
written and performed by Gelsey Bell
directed by Anne DeMelo
Workshop | June 2026
sickbed is an aural experience that tells the 4.5-billion-year story of Earth’s history using the phenomenological scale of the listener’s body in a sickbed. Events such as the creation of the moon, the emergence of life, the journey of plants and then animals onto terra firma, and previous mass extinction events are layered onto a meditation for and of the human engagement with chronic pain and disability.
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Gelsey Bell (Playwright/Performer) (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary performance creator, composer, playwright, and vocalist. Her recent works include the experimental opera mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] (2023), commissioned by the HERE Arts Center and presented in the Prototype Festival; Cairns (2020), a soundwalk for Green-Wood Cemetery; shuffleyamamba: Yamamba as a Bear (2021), a dance-theater piece created with Yasuko Yokoshi; and Mouthful (2024), an experimental opera by thingNY. Other recent compositions include “Archaeopteris,” commissioned by Wet Ink; “Oy Deus,” commissioned by Alkemie; and “From the Soil Back to the Soil,” commissioned by the Daxophone Consort. She has released multiple albums, including the recent mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning], Skylighght, and Heads Together. She has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Opera America, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Japan Foundation, NYSCA, and others. She was recently awarded the Edwin Booth Award by the CUNY Graduate students and an Herb Alpert/Ucross residency. Other performance highlights include Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway, Off-Broadway, etc.) and Ghost Quartet (Off-Broadway), Robert Ashley’s Foreign Experiences and Improvement, Darius Jones’s Samesoul Maker, Alaina Ferris’s The Lydian Gale Parr, Aaron Siegel’s Rainbird, and other works by Jay Afrisando, Kate Soper, Tomomi Adachi, Dan Trueman, and others. www.gelseybell.com
Anne DeMelo (Director) is a director and writer working across theatre, film, opera, and rock n’ roll. Raised in the rural Blue Ridge Mountains, she is now based in NYC. Anne develops and directs athletic, expressive, interdisciplinary and intertextual work that often draws on and re-frames old stories, archival materials, and historical texts. With cultural roots in Appalachian folklore and Latin American surrealism, and a CV that spans classic and contemporary theater, narrative film, concert touring, site-specific immersive installation, and experimental opera, her work is a genre-melting site for the exploration of new ways of seeing, thinking, and being together. Collaboration and community-making are at the core of her practice. Anne’s stage direction has been seen at Ars Nova’s ANTFest, The Bushwick Starr, Exponential Festival at The Brick, JACK, LaMama Galleria, Pipeline, Prague Fringe, LPAC, and Columbia University, among others; her production of Ellen McLaughlin’s The Trojan Women was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. In 2023, she was the Creative Director for GRAMMY Award-winning duo Rodrigo y Gabriela’s national tour, In Between Thoughts. Her debut short film, I Have Love In Me, is currently on the festival circuit. As an associate/assistant director, Anne has collaborated on two world premieres subsequently recognized by the Pulitzer Prize, several international opera tours, and at cultural institutions including BAM Next Wave, LA Opera/REDCAT, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Detroit Opera, Atlantic Theater Company, VisionIntoArt/the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the Prototype Festival. She is currently an Associate Editor at 53rd State Press, a New Georges Affiliated Artist, and an Associate Member of the SDC. MFA: John Wells Directing Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University.
LINE UP
a new play by Kenneth Keng
puppetry by Camille Cooper
directed by Annaporva Green
Workshop | July 2026
A squad of mothers joins their colonizer's army for the chance to win citizenship for their families.
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Annaporva Green (Director) is Indian-born, Floridian-raised, New York-based theater artist. Annaporva’s work centers around memory, archival research, and presenting the past and future as a way to discuss our current moment. She has directed Kenneth Keng’s AMA (Target Margin Theater), Brought Up (University Settlement), and Wake Up (Sarah Lawrence College). Annaporva served as an Associate Director on Terror Is the Order of the Day by Ben Heineman Jr. (The Flea Theater) and directed Zee Hanna’s Sunshower (The Tank). Her scripts Will You Watch It Burn? and The Marvelous Mabel Stark have been read at La MaMa ETC and the Makers’ Space respectively. She is a company tour manager for Reggie Wilson’s Fist and Heel Performance Group. Annaporva is an assistant teacher of Intimacy In Performance at NYU Tisch and Stage Combat at the Atlantic Theater School. www.annaporvagreen.com
Kenneth Keng (Playwright) is a New York-based Filipino-Chinese playwright and performer who makes work about falling in love with a culture devouring his own. In 2024 Kenneth was a recipient of the Philippines’ national award for literature, the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award. In 2023/24 he was an Artist-In-Residence with the Performance Project@University Settlement, which developed and staged their postcolonial Filipino space opera Brought Up. They have been selected as a Finalist for The Civilians/Princeton’s Next Forever Initiative 2024 for Harmonic Tremors, a documentary play about Philippine civil society’s response to the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption, co-written with Guelan Luarca. In NYC, their plays have been selected for staging at the Target Margin, A.R.T. Mezzanine, Brick Aux, JACK, Chain, Tank, Maker’s Space and Speyer Hall theatres. kennethkeng.com
Camille Cooper (Puppeteer) (he/they) is a New York based puppeteer, multidisciplinary artist, and theatrical technician born and raised in Northern New Mexico. While there, he puppeteered with The Human Beastbox, Meow Wolf, and The New Mexico Museum of Art. In New York, he has puppeteered with entities including Snake in The Boot Collective, Foreshadow Co., Fictionville Studios, and Concrete Temple Theatre. He holds a BA in puppetry and technical theatre from Sarah Lawrence College. @camelcooper // camillecooperworks.com
THE TUSK HUNTERS
a new play by Dan Caffrey
directed by Dina Vovsi
Workshop | July 2026
Two men in the Alaskan tundra search for woolly mammoth tusks as an alternative to elephant ivory. But their most recent discovery causes their employer to pivot from the ivory trade to a more technologically innovative venture as a means of combating climate change. Inspired by the real-life founding of Colossal Biosciences, The Tusk Hunters explores the morality of de-extinction and the toll that scientifically revolutionary ideas take on those who execute them.
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Dan Caffrey is a playwright, musician, teacher, and pop-culture critic who graduated from The University of Texas at Austin's M.F.A. Playwriting program in 2020. Prior to that, he lived and made new theatrical work in Chicago for more than a decade, where he co-founded the Tympanic Theatre Company (RIP) and served as its Artistic Director from 2007 to 2015. He's currently based in Brooklyn after a stint teaching playwriting at the Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. His work draws heavily from wildlife, horror, and various otherworldly elements. He's interested in how these external, often non-human forces can upend his characters' views of humanity, pushing them to confront more internal threats such as secrecy, repression, insecurity, and fear. Most recently, his stories have focused on the physical and psychological effects of the climate crisis, including the zero-waste world premiere of his play The Amphibians at Weber State University and River Watchers, an immersive theatre experience on a moving 14-person canoe in Brooklyn's Newtown Creek (co-created with Dina Vovsi and Jens Rasumussen). Other work includes the plays Matwan, KAIJU, Universal Monsters, and Sow and Suckling, and “Mortality Rate,” an audio drama commissioned by 20th Century Studios as a tie-in to the Stephen King film The Boogeyman. Dan is a proud alumnus of the 2023/2024 Civilians' R&D Group. He has been a three-time O'Neill Finalist and seven-time Semi-Finalist, two-time Finalist for Princeton University and The Civilians' The Next Forever project, Jerome Fellowship Semi-Finalist, shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship's 2021 Theatre Prize, Semi-Finalist for the Princess Grace Awards Playwriting Fellowship, Resident Artist at Tofte Lake Center, M.F.A. Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has been published in several anthologies by Smith & Kraus, including The Best Women's Stage Monologues 2021. His plays have recently been developed/produced by Gloucester Stage, Think Tank Theatre, the Atlantic Acting School, Hot Playwright Summer, The Workshop Theater, The Orchard Project, American Records, Mixily Presents, Greenbrier Valley Theatre, JOOK, Jarrott Productions, Kitchen Dog Theater, Hot Kitchen Collective, Genesis Ensemble, Sundown Collaborative Theatre, The Road Theatre Company, Otherworld Theatre Company, and Pegasus PlayLab, as well as many colleges and universities all around the country. His play "A Seed" was part of the 46th Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, produced by Concord Theatricals. His play "Duckass" was part of the 2022 festival, making it to the final 12. Dan has also written for a variety of pop-culture publications, including The A.V. Club, Consequence, Pitchfork, and Vox. His first book, Radiohead FAQ, is currently available from Backbeat Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield). He co-hosts The Losers' Club: A Stephen King Podcast (recipient of the Silver Bolo Award For Excellence In Horror Media) and Halloweenies: A Horror Franchise podcast, in addition to recording music with Mae Shults under the name Methodist Hospital. Dean of American Rock Critics Robert Christgau hailed their debut album, Giants, as one of the best of 2018.
Dina Vovsi (Director) is a New York-based director, theatermaker, and educator. She is excited to return to the cell after collaborating on Veda Kumarjiguda’s ABHINAYA: a dance play. Upcoming projects include Billy McEntee’s Amo’s Aunts Keep PopPop Alive (Justoffa Exit 155) and Liba Vaynberg’s The Matriarchs. Recent projects include The Blue Parts with co-creator Liba Vaynberg (2024-25 Next Stage Special Residency at The Drama League, Working Theater 5 Boroughs 1 City Commission, and 2023 NYSCA Support for Artists Grant) and River Watchers, a site-specific, journey-based play she conceived and directed on a 14-seat Langley canoe in Newtown Creek and co-created with Dan Caffrey and Jens Rasmussen (The Motor Company, 2023 Brooklyn Arts Council and Puffin Foundation Grants). Dina has directed and developed new work with WP Theater, The Civilians, New Georges, Working Theater, Cape Cod Theatre Project, The Orchard Project, New Dramatists, The Bushwick Starr, Fresh Ground Pepper, and more. She is a New Georges Affiliated Artist and current co-leader of the New Georges Jam, and an alum of the WP Directors’ Lab, the Roundabout Directors Group, the Mercury Store Directing Lab, the Robert Moss Directing Fellowship at Playwrights Horizons, The Civilians’ R&D Group, the Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab, and the SDC Foundation Observership. As an associate/assistant director, Dina has worked on Broadway, off-Broadway, and regionally with Roundabout, Playwrights Horizons, Spoleto Festival USA, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and more. A frequent guest director at universities, Dina also teaches directing at Playwrights Horizons Theater School at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and acting at Brooklyn College's MFA Acting Graduate Program. www.dinavovsi.com
OUT EAST
a new play by Sam Mueller
directed by Mackenna Goodrich
Reading | October 2026
Set in the beautiful backyard of an enormous East Hampton estate, this new comedy explores a group of domestic workers forced to quarantine with the owners’ secret mistress during the height of an ongoing pandemic.
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Sam Mueller (Playwright) [they|she] is a Chicago-born, Florida-raised, New York-based playwright who finds purpose in the excavation of expansive queerness all around us. Their plays include At the Confluence of Creeks (McKnight National Residency Finalist) and PIN. (O’Neill NPC Finalist). Sam's plays Laced and 70.3 are available through Broadway Play Publishing. They are an alum of EST/Youngblood, Ucross Foundation, The New Harmony Project, and Under Construction at The Road Theatre, and a 2024-2025 Terrence McNally fellow at Rattlestick Theater. They are a co-founder of Ten Toes Theater Collective, an NYC-based collaborative group of trans+ theater artists supporting grassroots organizations dedicated to the wellbeing and freedoms of TGNC people across the country. Sam feels most at home in the pit of a punk show. BS: Northwestern University
Mackenna Goodrich (Director) (she/they) loves Big Girl Explosion Fests and plays of and about the body. Selected directing credits: The Station by Maggie Cregan (SheNYC), small town icons by SMJ (Off the Lane), Cockroaches by Emma Schillage (The Cell), Straight Icons by SMJ and Anne-Marie Pietersma (Ars Nova/Second City NYC), American Girl Doll Horror Play by Jasmine Sharma (The Brick), An Axemas Story (The Players Theatre/54 Below), WO[MAN] by Alyssa Haddad-Chin (The Brick), Radio Man by Sarah Groustra (SheNYC), Bogeyman by Allison Merkel (The Road Theatre Company). Mackenna is also an associate producer for SciShow and SciShow Kids and runs The Road Theatre Company's Under Construction playwriting group. She also does hot yoga because it makes her feel like a lizard on a rock. BA: Kenyon College
POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWBANG
a new play by Utkarsh Rajawat
directed by Kedian Keohan
projection design by Minna Lee
Workshop | September 2026
A gun-slinging western, Papa Roach, and sissy porn collide in a two-person duel that leaps through genres and your computer screen to determine the root of all evil.
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Utkarsh Rajawat (Playwright) is following the call of Rasha Abdulhadi, who they know of through “Notes on Craft” by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, to use their bio to uplift resistance efforts against the US-sponsored, Israeli genocide of Palestinians. You can contribute to the movement by donating food baskets, e- Sims, supplies, endorsing PACBI, attending an action, engaging in BDS. I hope more institutions are moved to full-throated support, with their words, their resources, their (divestment from Israeli) money, as Palestinian people like those of The Freedom Theatre have been asking for. You can contact PACBI@wawog.com if you have questions or concerns, including legal ones, about your cultural or academic organization’s commitment. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Kedian Keohan (Director) (they/he) is a trans theater director and creator of live performance. Director: ISABEL (NAATCO), Erin Markey’s First Lady (Bard Spiegeltent), Anatomical Hearts (Dartmouth), Last Gold (Hunter), WORK HARD HAVE FUN MAKE HISTORY (Breaking the Binary), BLUSH (Soho Rep Writer Director Lab). Associate Director: Ryan J. Haddad’s Dark Disabled Stories (The Public Theater/Bushwick Starr). Assistant Director: Orlando (Signature), Pathetic (Abrons Art Center), Singlet (Bushwick Starr), and Rags Parkland Sings the Songs of the Future (Ars Nova). Kedian performed the role of Major in NY Times’ Critic Pick Marie It’s Time (HERE Arts Center) written by Julia Jarcho. Kedian is a former Clubbed Thumb Directing Fellow and Soho Rep Writer Director Lab member, and a New Georges affiliated artist. @justkedian
THE CHARIOTEER
a new play by Dan Giles
directed by Matt Dickson
Ticketed Performance | October—November 2026
Shortly after Charly visits her estranged brother at college, he vanishes off the grid to live in a radical environmentalist commune. Ten years later, he needs her help. But first, she needs answers. The Charioteer is two-hander about the inevitability and difficulty of change.
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Dan Giles (he/him) is a playwright from Massachusetts. He’s a recent graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at The Juilliard School. His work has been produced and developed with Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York Stage and Film, Next Door at New York Theatre Workshop, New Light Theater Project, First Floor Theater, Haven Theatre, The Great Plains Theatre Commons, and others. He is a proud alum of Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theatre. His work has received the Clifford Odets Ensemble Commission from Lee Strasberg/NYU, the New Light New Voices Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Screenwriting Award, and the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for Comic Playwriting. He’s been a finalist for Ingram New Works at Nashville Rep, Lighthouse Works, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Pipeline, The Lark, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and the Playwrights Center; a semifinalist for the Terrence McNally New Works Incubator at Rattlestick, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and the Princess Grace Award; and an honorable mention for the Relentless Award. He is a graduate of Harvard College (AB) and Carnegie Mellon School of Drama (MFA). dangilesplaywright.weebly.com