Through the Huntington Playwriting Fellows program, the Huntington fosters the talents of local playwrights at all stages of their careers, from emerging talents to established professionals, and encourages and facilitates conversations among Boston’s playwriting community. Fellows are awarded two-year residencies during which they are provided a modest grant, participate in a bi-weekly writers’ collective, and benefit from access to the artistic staff and to the resources of the Huntington. The three 2010 Fellows were selected from among 60 applicants. The Huntington Playwriting Fellows program is supported by the Stanford Calderwood Fund for New American Plays and the Harry Kondoleon Playwriting Fund.
John Oluwole ADEkoje's short play Cry Baby Jones was part of GRIMM (Company One) and was nomainted for an Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) Award for Best New Play. He was also nominated for two IRNEs for his play Love Jones. Mr. ADEkoje is a National Award winner of the Kennedy Center ACTF — Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting award for his play Street Hawker, as well as the winner of the National Triennial New Play Competition. He was recently commissioned to write a new play by the Boston Black Theater Collective. He is a recipient of the Brother Thomas Fellowship for this documentary film, Street Soldiers, for which he won the Emerging Filmmakers Award by the Roxbury International Film Festival. Street Soldiers has been shown at the Pan African Film Festival at Cannes, France, and the World Film Festival in Montreal, Canada. He is currently editing his feature film, Knockaround Kids. Mr. Adekoje is a proud recipient of the Surdna Arts Teachers Fellowship. He is currently a Playwright in Residence at Company One and UMass Boston and a faculty member in the theatre department at Boston Arts Academy where he teaches playwriting, filmmaking, and directing.
Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro is a Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellow and a 2011 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow in Playwriting. Her plays include Behind Enemy LInes (Pan Asian Repertory Theatre), Mishima (East West Players), Martha Mitchell (Edinburgh Fringe Festival; Theater Center Philadelphia; Six Figures Theater Company, New York; and others), Barrancas (Magic Theatre), Pablo and Cleopatra (New Theater), Mexico City (The Boston Women on Top Festival), Sailing Down the Amazon (BWTF and JRV Productions), and It Doesn't Take a Tornado and Amsterdam (La MaMa ETC.). She is the writer and narrator of Japanese American Women: A Sense of Place, a documentary directed by Leita Hagemann Luchetti (part of a Smithsonian Institution exhibit and aired by PBS in Seattle). Seven of her short plays have been in the Boston Theater Marathon, and eight were finalists in the National Ten-Minute Play Contest. Her plays have been anthologized by Baker's Plays, Heinemann, Charta Books, Smith and Kruas, and Meriwether Publishing. Ms. Alfaro is 72 years old, and has been a resident of Cambridge, MA for more than 40 years.
Eleanor Burgess is a playwriting fellow at the Huntington Theatre Company and an alumna of the writers' group at the Arcola Theatre in London. Her work has also been read or developed at the Vineyard Theatre, New Georges, Broad Horizons, and Reverie Productions. She is a native of Brookline, Massachusetts and an alumna of Yale College.
Miranda Craigwell is a writer for stage and screen, as well as an actress. Her works includes The Strongest Shape (Paines Plough Future Perfect finalist), Reply, Please (Rose Theatre in London), Requests (Staged reading directed by Melanie Hillyard), and Sugar Moth. She attended Brown University where she was a three-year captain of the women’s basketball team, graduated with a B.A. in literature and cultures in English, and was awarded a David Zucconi Memorial Fellowship, which allowed her to travel to London to study Eighteenth century female letter writers and epistolary theory. She began performing her written work in Slam poetry competitions at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Theatre Royal Stratford, and other venues before being named the Farrago Central London Slam Poet Champion in 2005. Ms. Craigwell received a Master’s degree with Distinction from Rose Bruford College of Drama for both acting and playwriting. She is currently an actor/educator with Urban Improv and a writer, director, and producer for the Boston-based production company Beyond Measure Productions. She recently joined the board of Into Your Art LLC.
Lydia R. Diamond's plays include: Stick Fly (’12 Outer Circle Critics Nomination – Best Play [Broadway],’10 Irne Award – Best Play, ’10 LA Critics Circle Award – Playwriting, ’10 LA Garland Award - Playwriting, ’09 LA Weekly Theatre Award – Playwriting, ’08 Susan S. Blackburn Finalist, ‘06 Black Theatre Alliance Award),’06 Joseph Jefferson Award Nomination – Best New Work, Voyeurs de Venus (’06 Joseph Jefferson Award – Best New Work, ‘06 BTAA – Best Writing), The Bluest Eye (’06 Black Arts Alliance Image Award – Best New Play, ‘08 American Alliance for Theatre and Education Distinguished Play Award), The Gift Horse (’05 Theodore Ward Prize, Kesselring Prize 2nd Place), Harriet Jacobs and, Stage Black. Theatres include: Arena Stage, Cort Theatre (Broadway), Chicago Dramatists, Company One, Congo Square, Everyman Theatre Company, Freedom Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Hartford Stage, Huntington Theatre Co., Jubilee Theatre, Kansas City Rep, Long Wharf, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, McCarter Theatre Co., Mo’Olelo Theatre Co., MPAACT, New Vic (Off Broadway), Playmakers Rep, Plowshares Theatre Co., Steppenwolf, TrueColors, and Contemporary American Theatre Festival. Commissions include: Steppenwolf (4), McCarter, Huntington, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville/Victory Gardens, Humana, Boston University, and The Roundabout. Stick Fly and Harriet Jacobs published by NU Press, Bluest Eye, Gift Horse, Stage Black - Dramatic Publishing, Stick Fly - Samuel French. Lydia is a graduate of Northwestern University where she majored in Performance Studies. Lydia was an ’05/’06 W.E.B. Du Bois Institute non-resident Fellow, a 2007 TCG/NEA Playwright in Residence at Steppenwolf, an 06/07 Huntington Playwright Fellow, a 2012/’13 Radcliffe Institute Fellow, a 2012 Sallie B. Goodman McCarter Fellow, a 2012 Sundance Institute Playwright Lab Creative Advisor, is Co-Vice President of Theatre Communication Group’s Board of Directors, is a Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists, has an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Pine Manor College, and is on faculty at Boston University.
Patrick Gabridge's full-length plays include Fire on Earth, Constant State of Panic, Blinders,and Reading the Mind of God, and have been staged by theatres across the country. He began writing and producing audio plays in 1993 with the No Name Radio Players and Chameleon Stage, and his work has been broadcast by NPR, Shoestring Radio Theatre, and Icebox Radio Theatre. He apparently has a strange fondness for bricks and unreasonable fury towards bad shoppers. Gabridge is a member of the Dramatists Guild and serves on the board of StageSource. In his spare time, he likes to farm.
Lawrence Goodman’s plays include The Disappearance of the Jews, Keep Your Distance, An Evening of Highly Self-Indulgent Semi-Autobiographical Comedy, and Rain Later. His work has been performed at The Brick Playhouse in Philadelphia, the HERE Arts Center in New York, and the New York International Fringe Festival. He received the 2011 Rhode Island Fellowship Award in Play and Screenwriting. He worked as a reporter at New York Daily News and New York Post before moving to Providence, RI, where he currently lives with his two children and wife. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont and a B.A. in English from Harvard College.
Kirsten Greenidge is the author of The Luck of the Irish, Bossa Nova, Milk Like Sugar, Rust, The Curious Walk of the Salamander, Sans-Culottes in the Promised Land, 103 Within the Veil, and The Gibson Girl. She has developed her work at Sundance (Utah and Ucross), Magic Theatre, National New Play Network, Cardinal Stage, South Coast Repertory, Madison Rep, Page 73, Hourglass Group, Bay Area Playwrights, Playwrights Horizons, New Dramatists, Mark Taper Forum, A.S.K., Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Guthrie Theater, Mixed Blood, McCarter Theatre, Humana Festival of New American Plays, Moxie Theatre, and New Georges. She is the recipient of a Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellowship, an NEA/TCG residency at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and was recently playwright-in-residence at Company One. She has also received Sundance's Time Warner Award for Bossa Nova. Ms. Greenidge attended Wesleyan University and the Playwrights the University of Iowa's Playwrights Workshop, and is a member of New Dramatists and Rhombus. She is currently working on a commission from Yale Repertory Theatre.
MJ Kaufman is a playwright, dancer, and teacher. He has received awards and commissions from the Huntington, the Program for Women in Theater, the Playwrights’ Foundation, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, and Young Playwrights Inc. Originally from Portland, OR, MJ attended Wesleyan University and is currently studying playwriting at Yale School of Drama. His work has been translated into Russian and performed in Moscow. Kaufman was awarded the Jane Chambers Prize for Feminist Theater in 2010 for his play A Live Dress.
John Kuntz is the author of 14 full-length plays, including The Superheroine Monologues (co-written with Rick Park), Sing Me to Sleep, Freaks, Starfuckers, After School Special, My Life with the Kringle Kult, Miss Price, The Hotel Nepenthe, Glitterati,Emerald City, Jasper Lake, Jump/Rope and Actorz with a Z. He received both an Elliot Norton Award and New York International Fringe Festival Award for his solo showStarfuckers, and both of his plays Sing Me To Sleep and Freaks! received Elliot Norton Awards for Outstanding Fringe Production. He was an inaugural Playwriting Fellow with the Huntington Theatre Company and a Fellow at the O’Neill Center 2007. His playJasper Lake received both the Michael Kanin and Paula Vogel National Playwriting Awards, with productions at the Kennedy Center (Washington DC) and the New York Fringe Festival. His newest solo show, The Salt Girl, was honored with the 2010 Elliot Norton Award for Best New Play. He teaches at Suffolk University, Concord Academy, and is on the faculty of The Boston Conservatory.
Ryan Landry is Ryan Landry. He has been a working writer, director, and performer for over thirty years and plans to keep writing plays until he drops dead. His proudction of Psyched was produced by the Huntington during the 2011 Emerging America Festival. His Boston-based troupe the Gold Dust Orphans produces satirical "mash-ups" of pop culture – comedic, dramatic, or musical – in both Provincetown and Boston. Past productions include Mildred Fierce, Peter Pansy, Phantom of the Oprah, Willy Wanker and the Hershey Highway, All About Christmas Eve, Death of a Saleslady, Medea, A T-Stop Named Denial, Christmas on the Pole, and Valet of the Dolls. He is a resident of Dorchester, MA.
Melinda Lopez previously appeared at the Huntington in Persephone, A Month in the Country, and The Rose Tattoo. Most recently she played Victoria in The Motherf**ker with the Hat (SpeakEasy Stage Company). Other credits include Oil Thief and A Girls War (Boston Playwrights’ Theatre), Anna in the Tropics and Theatre District (SpeakEasy Stage Company), Romeo and Juliet (Portland Stage), and Many Colors Make the Thunder-king (Guthrie Theater). She is featured in the movie Fever Pitch. Ms. Lopez is also an award- winning playwright (Sonia Flew, Orchids to Octopi, and Caroline in Jersey), and a Huntington Playwriting Fellow. She teaches playwriting at Boston University.
Rebekah Maggor is a playwright, actress and voice and speech specialist. Her play Two Days at Home Three Days in Prison received readings at the Huntington Theatre Company, the New York Theatre Workshop, and the Old Vic Theatre in London. She performed her one-woman play Shakespeare’s Actresses in America at the Huntington Theatre Company, the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, The Players Club, and the American Repertory Theatre. Maggor has received commissions or grants from the Catalyst Collaborative @ M.I.T., the Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Cambridge Arts Council, the Huntington Theatre Company Playwriting Fellowship, and the Middle Eastern Theater Project. As an actress she has worked with directors Robert Woodruff, Peter Sellers, Andrei Serban, Anne Bogart, János Szász and others. As a voice and speech specialist she has coached on Broadway, in regional theater, for film and television, and been a dialect consultant for PBS and NPR. She is an Associate Editor of the International Dialects of English Archive and an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework. Maggor was founding director of the Derek Bok Center’s Program in Speaking and Learning at Harvard University. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from the American Repertory Theatre.
Ronan Noone’s plays The Lepers of Baile Baiste, The Blowin of Baile Gall, The Athiest, Brendan, and Little Black Dress have played in theatres across the United States, London, and the Philippines. He is published by Samuel French Ltd., Baker’s Plays, Dramatists Play Service Ltd., and the Princeton Library Chronicle. His plays have won Independent Reviewers of New England Best New Play awards, an Elliot Norton Outstanding Script award, and a National Playwriting award.
Masha Obolensky’s writing credits include Not Enough Air, produced by the Nora Theatre in Cambridge in 2010 and by Timeline Theatre in Chicago in 2009. It received the Jane Chambers Student Playwriting Award and first prize in Boston Theatre Works Unbound Festival, and was nominated for an Equity Joseph Jefferson Award for Outstanding New Work. It was recently presented in Transport Groups Dark Night Reading Series. Obolensky’s original performance pieces have been performed at La Mama E.T.C., New Georges, HERE Arts Center, and Access Theatre. Her 10-minute play Girls Play won the 2010 Kennedy Center National College Theatre Festival and was performed in the Boston Theatre Marathon and in The Source Festival D.C. It will be published in the International Centre for Women Playwrights upcoming Diversity Scenes Anthology. The full-length version, The Girl Problem, was awarded a 2010 WordBRIDGE fellowship. Obolensky received the 2010 Pen New England Discovery Award and has an M.F.A. in playwriting from Boston University.
Jacqui Parker is a playwright, a director, an Elliot Norton Award-winning actor, and a six-time recipient of the Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE) Award, as well as a recipient of the 2004 Boston Theatre Hero Award given by StageSource. In addition to being a 2007-09 Huntington Playwriting Fellow, she is the Artistic Director of the Our Place Theatre Project and the founder of Boston’s annual African American Theatre Festival. Her play Dark As A Thousand Midnights won an IRNE Award for Best Play. Both Dark as a Thousand Midnights and her play Feathers on my Arms ... Zora Neale Flying High premiered at the African American Theatre Festival at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion. Her play Jeanie Don’t Sing No Mo’ was read as part of the Huntington’s 2009 Breaking Ground Festival of New Work
John Shea is a Huntington Playwriting Fellow whose play, Welcome to Somerville, Permit Parking Only, (a 17-character opus) enjoyed a very successful two night reading in his home town of — where else? — Somerville, Massachusetts. Other works set in and ground the beautiful and desirable neighborhoods of Somerville include Erin Go Bragh-less (National Playwright's Conference, Eugene O'Neil Theatre Center), The Hill (Boston University's New Play Initiative), Comp (Tristan Bates Theatre Company in London, Boston Playwright's Theatre), Clare Silva (Williamstown Theatre Festival's Fridays @ 3 series, Huntington Theatre Company's Breaking Ground Festival), Junkie (commissioned by the Huntington's Stanford Calderwood Fund for New American Plays), and The Painter, whihc he hopes to have on its feet in the spring of 2011. Many short works have been included in festivals around the country, most notably in the Boston Theatre Marathon, which he has run five times. playsbyshea.com.
Kate Snodgrass is the Artistic Director of Boston Playwright’s Theatre and the Boston Theatre Marathon. She is the author of Haiku (Heidemann Award, anthologized and translated into German, Gaelic, Portuguese), Observatory Conditions (Independent Reviewers of New England Award), and The Glider (Independent Reviewers of New England Award, AACT Steinberg Award Nomination), among others. She is a playwriting Fellow at the Huntington Theatre Company. Snodgrass has received StageSource’s Theatre Hero Award, the Leonides A. Nickole Award for Excellence from NETC, and the Milan Stitt Award from the Kennedy Center ACTF lauding her mentorship of playwrights.
Ken Urban’s plays have been produced and developed at The Summer Play Festival at The Public, The Flea, Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, the Huntington Theatre Company, Moving Arts, Collaboraction, Target Margin, The Theatre at Boston Court, Theatre of NOTE, Stage Left, Son of Semele Ensemble, Urban Stages, Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab, Soho Rep, Annex Theatre, and the Chocolate Factory. He is the recipient of the prestigious L. Arnold Weissberger Prize from the Williamstown Theatre Festival for his play Sense of an Ending. Other awards include a 2010 Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Writer’s Room of Boston, two MacDowell Colony Fellowships (2008, 2009), and the 2007-2009 Huntington Playwriting Fellowship. His plays include I (HEART) KANT, Nibbler, Halo, The Absence of Weather, The Private Lives of Eskimos, The Female Terrorist Project, and The Happy Sad. His work is published in the anthologies New York Theatre Review and Plays and Playwrights 2002 and is featured in numerous monologue and scene compilations. He recently completed a screenplay adaptation of his play The Happy Sad.
David Valdes Greenwood is the author of a dozen plays produced across the US and UK including Brave Navigator, published by Baker Plays and winner of the Midwest Theatre Network National New Play Contest, and Paradise of Earthworms, commissioned by Ensemble Studio Theatre. His plays have been staged at the Humana Festival, New York International Fringe Festival, City Theatre, Venture Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, and Emerson College, with readings presented by New York Theatre Workshop, Portland Stage, New Jersey Rep, Blue Coyote, Immediate Theatre, Theater Offensive, Boston TheatreWorks, and Centastage. His short plays Dream of Jeannie-by-the-Door and Day Either: Snow Globe have been anthologized. He is a Brother Thomas Fellow, a two-time Sloan Commission recipient, and a finalist for both the National New Play Network Smith Prize and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant. As a prose writer, he is the author of three books and a Huffington Post blogger. He teaches at Tufts University. His play Wandaleria, about a housebound woman's fantasy life catching up with her, will be staged by Argos Productions January 26 — February 12 at Boston Playwrights' Theatre.
Joyce Van Dyke received the 2009 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script for The Oil Thief, which was commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloane Foundation Science and Technology Project, and received its premiere in 2008 at the Boston Playwright's Theatre. Her play A Girl’s War premiered at New Repertory Theatre in 2003. She has been developing Deported, a true story about her grandmother, with director Judy Braha and a company of actors for two years through improvisation, taped interviews of survivors, photos, memoirs, and letters. Her play Deported / a dream play was read as part of the Huntington’s 2009 Breaking Ground Festival of New Work
Sinan Ünel is a member of the first cohorts of Huntington Playwriting Fellows. At the Huntington, he developed Pathetique (Breaking Ground 2004), Off the Cliff, and The Cry of the Reed, which was produced at the Huntington in 2007. Other works include Pera Palas, Single Lives, The Three of Cups, Thalassa My Heart, The Lost Gospels of Blakenburg, and A Mad Person's Chronicle of a Miserable Marriage. His work has been produced at the Long Wharf Theater, The Arcola Theatre (London), Boston Playwrights' Theatre, Lark Theatre Company (New York), Gate Theatre (London), Open Source Theater (Pittsburg), Provincetown Theatre Company, Landes-theater (Germany), Theater Kozmos (Austria), and Theatre at Boston Court (Pasadena). He has been awarded the Middle East America Special Jury Prize, The Ridgeala Award, the Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, and the John Gassner Memorial Award. His script Race Point was the winner of the 2001 New Century Writer Award for best screenplay. He is a long-time member of the Lark Theater Company in New York, where he recently developed his latest play, New Life. He divides his time between New York and Cape Cod and teaches at Lesley College in Boston. www.sinanunel.com