David Adjmi is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Steinberg Prize, and the Whiting Award, among others. His memoir Lot Six is forthcoming from HarperCollins. His play The Stumble is a commission from LCT, and Stereophonic (with music by Will Butler/Arcade Fire) is a co-commission from Second Stage and CTG. Other plays include Marie Antoinette, Elective Affinities, 3C, Stunning and The Evildoers. Stunning and Other Plays and Marie Antoinette/3C are both published by TCG.

Sarah Lunnie is a dramaturg. Based in New York, she is the Associate Artistic Director of the Jungle Theater (Minneapolis) and a company member with The Mad Ones. Recent projects: What The Constitution Means To Me (Broadway, NYTW, Clubbed Thumb), Hillary and Clinton (Broadway), Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie (Ars Nova). Other work at Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Bushwick Starr, the Denver Center, The Kennedy Center, The Lark, Ma-Yi, New Dramatists, the O’Neill, and Playwrights Horizons.

Whitney White is a director, musician, and playwright based in New York. Directing: What to Send Up When It Goes Down (The Movement, NYT Critics’ Pick), JUMP (PlayMakers Rep, NNPN Rolling World Premiere), Canyon (IAMA, LA Times Critics’ Choice), An Iliad (Long Wharf), Rita También Rita (Juilliard), Othello (Trinity Rep), and BR’ER COTTON (Endstation). Writing: Macbeth in Stride (2019 Under the Radar, The Public), Lover I’ll Bring You Back to Life (Ars Nova, 2017), Abduction (Soho Rep FEED Series).

Ricardo Pérez González is a queer Puerto Rican writer with bacalao on his breath and Salsa on his hips, recently finished writing on the third season of Netflix’s Designated Survivor. After developing Don’t Eat the Mangos at Sundance, his play On the Grounds of Belonging about racially segregated gay bars in 1950s Houston will premiere at Long Wharf this fall. Other upcoming projects include Orlando, a pilot with Nina Tassler about the Puerto Rican diaspora after Hurricane María.

David Mendizábal is a director/designer, a Producing Artistic Leader of The Movement Theatre Company, and Associate Artistic Director of The Sol Project. Select directing credits include: iNegro (Mentor Project), And She Would Stand Like This (TMTC), On the Grounds of Belonging (Public), & Tell Hector I Miss Him (Atlantic – Drama League Nomination). Former Artistic Associate at Atlantic Theater Company, current member of Latinx Theatre Commons, & Wingspace. Alumnus of Drama League, LCT Director’s Lab, NALAC, & artEquity. BFA NYU/Tisch.

Somi Kakoma was born in Illinois to immigrants from Uganda and Rwanda, and is an acclaimed vocalist-songwriter known simply as “Somi”. Her blend of modern jazz with African musics and the innate poetry of her songwriting often give voice to issues of social justice. Her latest recording, Petite Afrique (Sony/OKeh), is a song cycle about the dignity of immigrants and the gentrification of Harlem’s vibrant West African quarter. The album won the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album. Somi is a TED Senior Fellow, a Soros Equality Fellow, and a Doris Duke USA Fellow. Dreaming Zenzile is her first original play.

Lileana Blain-Cruz is a theater director. She won an Obie Award for her production of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World at Signature Theater. Other recent projects include Faust (Opera Omaha), Marys Seacole (LCT3), Fabulation (Signature), Pipeline (Lincoln Center), Thunderbodies and Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again (Soho Rep), The House That Will Not Stand and Red Speedo (New York Theater Workshop), Henry IV Part One and Much Ado About Nothing (OSF), WAR (Yale Rep and LCT3), and The Bluest Eye (The Guthrie). She was awarded a 2018 United States Artist Fellowship. Upcoming is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Girls at Yale Rep.

Charlayne Woodard is a two-time Obie Award winner & Tony Award nominee. Off-B’way: DADDY; Hamlet (Gertrude); WAR (Mother); Substance of Fire (Marge Hackett); The Witch of Edmonton (Witch); In The Blood (Hester); Fabulation (Undine); The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Grusha); Twelfth Night (Maria); Stunning; Sorrows and Rejoicings. Regional: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Titania); The Taming of the Shrew (Katherine); The Good Person of Szechuan. B’way: Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Original cast); Hair (revival). Film: Glass; Unbreakable; The Crucible; Eye for an Eye; Sunshine State. TV: Pose (series regular); recurring roles: Sneaky Pete; Law and Order, Special Victims Unit: ER: Guest Star: The Leftovers; The Blacklist. Playwright: Pretty Fire, Neat, In Real Life, The Night Watcher, Flight.

Liz Diamond serves as Resident Director at Yale Rep and Chair of Directing at Yale School of Drama. She has directed new and classical works at Yale Rep and at theatres across the US including A.R.T., Public Theater, American Conservatory Theatre, Arena Stage, Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She has won OBIE and Connecticut Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding Direction. Her translation and production of Stravinsky’s l’Histoire du Soldat recently premiered at Zankel Hall in New York.

Faisal Abu Alhayjaa is a Fellow at the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, and was born in the Jenin Refugee Camp in Palestine. When Juliano Mer-Khamis opened an acting school as a part of The Freedom Theatre in the Camp, Faisal was part of the inaugural class. After graduating, he was a resident artist of The Freedom Theatre for the next five years and taught the next generation of students. Faisal has performed with The Freedom Theatre throughout Palestine, as well as in Brazil, India, the UK, the US, and across Europe. As a member of Red Noses International and a graduate of their International School of Humour in Austria, he has performed as a clown in refugee camps across Greece with their Emergency Smile initiative, and in children’s hospitals in the West Bank. Faisal’s directing credits include At-Tuwani (Palestine), A Skate Play (Palestine) and Hamesha Shamida (India). He was a leading artist for The Freedom Bus, a project that toured Palestine to promote cultural resistance. Faisal toured the UK with celebrated British comedian, Mark Thomas, performing Showtime from the Frontline.

Khawla Ibraheem is a Syrian/Palestinian theatre artist considered an up-and-coming talent in Palestine. Khawla is regular suspect in the National Palestinian Theatre where she has recently created two shows as writer director for the national main stage, Story Keeper and Soon to be gone. She is a long time collaborator of Amir Nizar Zuabi, and a part of the United Theatres of Europe project of International Super Objective Theatre.

Alaa Shehada is a theatre maker who was trained at The Freedom Theatre Acting School in Jenin camp, Palestine. He has performed all over the world: US, Europe, Turkey, Asia, and the UK. He is also a specialist in mask theatre, trained at Theatre Hotel Courage, Amsterdam. Alaa does clowning with Red Noses International. Recently, he won the Special Jury Award for Best Actor at the International Festival of Liberal Theatre in Jordan, and also won the Best Theatre Performance in 2018 for Return to Palestine.

Clarence Coo is a recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award and the 2012 Yale Drama Series Prize. His plays include The Birds of Empathy, Beautiful Province (Belle Province), People Sitting in Darkness, and The God of Wine. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and the manager of academic administration of Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program.

Kareem Fahmy is a Canadian-born director and playwright of Egyptian descent. His world premieres include 3/Fifths (3LD, New York Times Top 5 Must-See Shows), This Time (Sheen Center, New York Times Critics’ Pick) and Refuge*Malja (Portland Stage). 2019 Phil Killian Directing Fellow (Oregon Shakespeare Festival). 2017 National Directors Fellow (The O’Neill/NNPN). Kareem’s plays include The Triumphant, Pareidolia, The In-Between, and an adaptation of the acclaimed Egyptian novel The Yacoubian Building. MFA Directing: Columbia University.

Bassem Youssef, dubbed the Jon Stewart of the Arab World and originally a heart surgeon, was the host of the popular TV show Al-Bernameg, which was the first-of-its-kind political satire show in the Middle East region. His show became the most watched show in the history of Egyptian TV with an average of 40 million viewers every week. After having to escape from Egypt, Youssef is now starting a third career as a comedian in the US.

Ritesh Batra was nominated for BAFTA for his first feature film The Lunchbox which he developed at the Sundance Feature Film Program, it starred Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur. Since then he has worked on The Sense of an Ending based on the Booker Prize-winning book, Our Souls at Night with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, based on the novel by Kent Haruf. His new movie Photograph was screened at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals in 2019. He lives and works in New York.

Heather Christian is an Obie Award winning composer/performer and Sundance Time Warner Fellow. She makes original performance work (Animal Wisdom Bushwick Starr, Mission Drift Nat’l Theater London, The World Is Round BAM,) as well as scores film (The Shivering Truth (Adult Swim), Lemon, Gregory Go Boom, Sundance Grand Jury Prize). She has released 8 records with her band, the Arbornauts, owns and operates The Arbor recording studio in Beacon, NY, and can be seen all over the world avant-torching.

Dima Mikhayel Matta is a university instructor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Balamand, a writer, and an actress. She received a Fulbright scholarship and completed her MFA in creative writing at Rutgers University. She has been acting for the stage since 2006. In 2014, she founded Cliffhangers, the first bilingual storytelling platform in Lebanon. In 2018, she curated the first LGBTQ+ art exhibition in Lebanon. She is currently working on her first play.

Fadi Toufiq is a writer & artist, born in Beirut 1975. Fadi works with different mediums: books, videos, and performance art. His primary interest lies in deconstructing grand narratives by means of reassembling fragmented events, as close as possible to the way it unfolds and strikes who experiences it at firsthand. His performance and art installations have been shown in different art venues around the world, such as MUMOK in Vienna, the Centre chorégraphique de Rennes in France, and Performa Biennial in New York.