Jonathan Larson Grants

Christie Baugher (Music, Lyrics & Book) is a musical storyteller for stage and screen based in Los Angeles. She wrote the book, music and lyrics for The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul, which was a selection of the 2020 Pacific Playwrights Festival at South Coast Repertory and will receive its world premiere production in Los Angeles in spring 2024 directed by Danny Mefford. Her other musicals in development include Leni Riefenstahl Is Going To Tell You The Truth, The Near Tomorrow and Bobby (book/music/lyrics) and Blue Skies (music and lyrics, book by Maria Alexandria Beech). Christie’s work as a playwright and songwriter has been featured on five continents, at venues ranging from Joe’s Pub to the Seoul Institute of the Arts to her grandparents’ basement. Christie is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild, ASCAP and Maestra. She came in third on Jeopardy!, but she had fun anyway. MFA: NYU/Tisch. www.christiebaugher.com

Paris Ray Dozier (Music & Lyrics) is a composer & lyricist from Los Angeles, California, whose Musical Theatre productions have opened across the United States. Dozier's career began when he was 15, after attending the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. He went on to write songs for artists on Disney Music Group's Hollywood Records, where he was also signed as a singer-songwriter and producer. After Hollywood Records, Dozier headed up the music department for B InTune TV, which broadcasted to 100 million households worldwide on NBC and Fox. Dozier also composed the music & lyrics for musicals and plays including Last Stop on Market Street, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, Mr. Chickee's Funny Money and X Marks the Spot. In 2018, he composed Lyric Opera of Chicago's Empower Youth Musical: We Got Next. In 2021, Dozier was brought on to write the music & lyrics for Emerald City, at Seattle Repertory Theatre. http://gurmanagency.com/selected-clients/paris-ray-dozier/

Jaime Lozano (Music) is a Mexican multi-hyphenate musical theatre storyteller considered by Lin-Manuel Miranda as the “next big thing” on Broadway. Joe’s Pub Working Group 2020-2022. The Civilians R&D Group 2020-2021. JACK Resident Artist 2021. Selected works: El Otro Oz -formerly The Yellow Brick Road- (Off-Broadway & National Tour), Carmen La Cubana (European Tour), Children of Salt (NYMF 2016 “Best of Fest” Production), A Never-Ending Line (Comédie Nation in Paris, France & Off-Broadway), Savage (UAB at Birmingham), Present Perfect (Live & In Color), Desaparecidas (JACK). Albums: “A Never-Ending Line,” “Jaime Lozano and the Familia: Songs by an Immigrant” released by Broadway Records. Film: “In The Heights” (orchestrations), “Tick, Tick… Boom!” (cameo in Broadway composers scene). His project “Jaime Lozano & The Familia” has performed sold out concerts at venues such as Joe’s Pub, 54 Below, The Green Room 42, Two River Theater, and more recently as part of the prestigious Lincoln Center’s American Songbook Series. Currently working on: “Songs by an Immigrant Vol. 2,” “Broadway en Spanglish,” and Frida, The Musical. BFA: Music & Composition, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León; MFA: NYU/Tisch, Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (Full Tuition Scholarship); part of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. Proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America, AFM Local 802, BMI and GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY member. https://www.jaimelozano.net/

Grace McLean is a performer, writer and composer. Broadway: Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. Off-Broadway and Regional include New Group, MCC, LCT3, The Public, Vineyard, La MaMa, BAM, Weston Playhouse, ART, Williamstown Theatre Festival. TV: The First Lady (Showtime), The Other Two (HBO Max). Her first musical In The Green earned her a Richard Rodgers Award for her writing and a Lortel for her performance. Grace McLean & Them Apples performed in the 2015 and 2016 seasons of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook, and Grace toured Pakistan and Russia as an artistic ambassador with the US State Department. Writer-in-residence at Lincoln Center, one of Broadway Women’s Fund’s Women to Watch (‘21), Civilians R&D Group (‘19-’20), MacDowell Fellow (‘18), Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award (‘17). The original cast recording for In The Green and EPs Make Me Breakfast and Natural Disaster are available now. www.gracemclean.com

Kit Yan is a transgender Yellow American New York based artist, born in Enping, China, and raised in the Kingdom of Hawaii.

Kit is a 2021 Kleban Prize recipient for Libretto, a 2021 Sundance IDP Fellow and grantee, a Vivace Award recipient for big ideas in musical theater, a former Musical Theater Factory Makers Fellow, Playwright’s Center fellow, Company One/Pao Arts Fellow, Lincoln Center Writer in residence, Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow and MacDowell Fellow.

Their films have been shown at OUTfest, CAAMfest, The LA Asian Pacific Film Festival, and The Asian American International Film Festival among many others.

Kit’s works include INTERSTATE and MISS STEP two queer and trans musicals written with Melissa Li, and QUEER HEARTACHE a solo show in poetry, among many others.

Kit’s forthcoming productions and commissions include work with Playwrights Horizons, OSF, East West Players, and San Diego Repertory Theater.

Their work has been supported/produced by the American Repertory Theater, MCC, Keen Company, the Smithsonian, NAMT, Musical Theater Factory, the New York Musical Festival, Mixed Blood, and Diversionary Theater.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a many-tentacled writer, director, and music-maker based in Brooklyn. Currently: Misha is writing PUBLIC OBSCENITIES (Soho Rep, NAATCO), a new bilingual play, and RHEOLOGY (HERE Arts), a concert-memoir-physics-symposium. Recently: BROTHER, BROTHER (New York Theatre Workshop) with Aleshea Harris; MUKHAGNI (Under the Radar) with Kameron Neal; HOW THE WHITE GIRL GOT HER SPOTS AND OTHER 90s TRIVIA (Joe’s Pub, Ars Nova) with Laura Grill Jaye. Misha and Laura have written many musicals together; their current collaboration, BLOOD OLEANDER, reimagines a century-old Bengali drama in Tennessee coal country. Misha is also the creator of VICHITRA, a series of sound-driven, cinematic experiments including IN ORDER TO BECOME (Bushwick Starr), which he is developing into a queer Carnatic opera. He was a soloist and collaborator on the Grammy-winning album CALLING ALL DAWNS and has been awarded fellowships from Sundance, Fulbright, NYSCA/NYFA, Jerome, New York Theatre Workshop, and Kundiman. MFA: Columbia.

Laura Grill Jaye is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, improviser, educator, performer, and music director. She is half of the musical-writing duo “Grill and Chowder” with Shayok Misha Chowdhury. Their work has been seen or developed at Ars Nova, New York Theatre Workshop, SPACE on Ryder Farm, NYMF, HERE Arts Center, and Joe’s Pub @ The Public Theater. With the Laura Grill Band, Laura has written and produced two records, NEVER BEFORE and TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS, and toured nationally. The Boston Globe called her original music “jump jazz, barroom rock, chamber folk, and downright infectious.” She has collaborated with Jacob Collier, Audra McDonald, Luciana Souza, and Jason Moran. Laura received her MM in Jazz Studies from New England Conservatory and her BM in Jazz Voice and Composition from the Chicago College of Performing Arts. She is on faculty at Meridian Academy in Boston and MIT’s Music and Theater Arts program.

Daniel and Patrick Lazour are brothers, musicians, and music theatre writers. Their musical We Live in Cairo premiered at the American Repertory Theater in May 2019 directed by Taibi Magar; and an album of its music Flap My Wings (Songs from We Live in Cairo) was, by the grace of G-d, recorded in quarantine and features major activist-songwriters from the Arab world. They’re developing Night Side Songs—a sing-along about cancer treatment, patients and caretakers—with the American Repertory Theater and Harvard University. Their movie musical Challenger: An American Dream is about the 1986 shuttle explosion and the Republican fallacy, and their 60-minute epic song Romulus & Remus, is based on Rome’s foundation myth. They are working with Ritesh Batra to adapt his film The Lunchbox for the stage. They thank Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Goodspeed, MacDowell, UCross, Dramatists Guild Foundation, and Yaddo for giving them space to work. They thank their friends at New York Theatre Workshop and are grateful to be Teaching Artists with Lincoln Center Theater. They also thank anybody who listens to their music—the most generous of those being their parents, Paul and Nel. @frereslazour

Zeniba Now is a musical storyteller and artscientist from Los Angeles, CA. Her work aims to inspire magic and possibility in human consciousness. Along with this brilliant honor, Z is also the winner of the 2020 Richard Rodgers Award, the 2021 Vivace Award, a Dramatist Guild Foundation Fellow, 2017 Alumni Residency Writer for #BARS at The Public, and West High’s Funniest Senior. Zeniba is a highly collaborative artist working in a variety of mediums. You can connect with her productions, performances, and releases by visiting her website www.zenibanow.com

Anna K. Jacobs is a composer, lyricist, librettist, and educator. Her work includes the stage musicals, POP! (Yale Rep, Pittsburgh City Theatre, Studio Theatre; book & lyrics by Maggie-Kate Coleman), TEETH (NAMT, O’Neill; co-book & lyrics by Michael R. Jackson), ANYTOWN (George Street Playhouse; book by Jim Jack), HARMONY, KANSAS (Diversionary Theatre; book & lyrics by Bill Nelson), ECHO (The Gallery Players, Musical Theatre Factory), and STELLA AND THE MOON MAN (Sydney Theatre Company/Theatre of Image; written by Richard Tulloch, co-composed by Adrian Kelly), and the movie musical, KAYA: TASTE OF PARADISE (NY Film Academy; directed by Paul Warner). Currently, she and playwright Anna Ziegler are collaborating on a new musical for Barbara Whitman Productions and Grove Entertainment. She is the recipient of the 2018 Eric Salzman Award for New Music Theater Composition and 2016 Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award. She holds an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU-Tisch, and is a former Sundance Fellow and Dramatists Guild Fellow. www.annakjacobs.com

Benjamin Velez is a composer/lyricist and Columbia graduate (114th Varsity Show). Proud member of the BMI workshop (2012 Harrington Award). His work has been at MTF, Ars Nova, NAMT, NEO, the Civilians, 4@15, and Joe's Pub. He was a Sundance Artist at the UCROSS Foundation, and his musical "Afterland" was developed at YIMT and the York Theater. He developed “Starblasters” at Dixon Place and will workshop it at Manhattan School of Music in Spring 2020. His musical “Borderline” won the 2018 Weston Playhouse New Musical Award and was workshopped at the 2019 O’Neill Musical Theater Conference. He was a 2018-2019 DGF Fellow and the 2019 Fred Ebb Award Winner. His musical “Kiss My Aztec”, written with John Leguizamo, Tony Taccone, and David Kamp, had its world premiere at Berkeley Rep (2019), followed by a run at the La Jolla Playhouse (Fall 2019).

The Bengsons 

Abigail and Shaun Bengson are a married composing and performing duo. Their theater work includesHundred Days (La Jolla Playhouse, New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theater, Know Theater, Z Space, US Tour), The Lucky Ones (Ars Nova), Sundown, Yellow Moon (Ars Nova/WP), Anything That Gives Off Light(Edinburgh Theatre Festival, US Tour), Hurricane Diane (New York Theatre Workshop, Two River Theatre), You’ll Still Call Me By Name (New York Live Arts, Jacob's Pillow), The Place We Built (The Flea), and Iphigenia in Aulis (Classic Stage Company). Their music has been featured on “So You Think You Can Dance” (FOX) and in several short films and dance pieces. They have received the Richard Rogers Award and nominations for the Drama Desk, Drama League, and Lucile Lortel awards.

Rona Siddiqui is composer/lyricist based in NYC. She recently won the prestigious Billie Burke Ziegfeld award. Her show Salaam Medina: Tales of a Halfghan, an autobiographical comedy about growing up bi-ethnic in America,had a reading at Playwrights Horizons Nov 2019 (dir. by Raja Feather Kelly). Other musicals include One Good Day,The Tin, and Treasure in NYC. She is the recipient of the ASCAP Foundation Mary Rodgers/Lorenz Hart Award, and the ASCAP Foundation/Max Dreyfus Scholarship. She has written pieces for Wicked's 16th anniversary commemoration Flying Free, 24 Hour Musicals, Prospect Theater Company, The Civilians, the NYC Gay Men's Chorus, and 52nd St Project, and has performed concerts of her work at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and 54 Below. Original scores she has written include The Vagina Monologues, Middletown and The Good Person of Szechuan. www.ronasiddiqui.com

Andy Roninson is a composer-lyricist, orchestrator, and music director in NYC. As a member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, he was awarded the Robert B. Sherman Scholarship and the Jerry Harrington Award for Creative Excellence. He participated in the 2017 Johnny Mercer Foundation Songwriters Project. He is the creator and host of TAKE A TEN, the all-original ten-minute musical podcast. Episodes have had live productions at theaters and schools around the world and have won numerous awards including Best Musical (2x) at Theatre Now New York's SOUND BITES festival, the 2016 City Theatre National Award for Short Playwriting, and the top prize at the 40th Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, which included publication by Samuel French. Recorded episodes featured the voice talents of Tony-nominees Laura Osnes and Rob McClure as well as Broadway and NYC actors like George Salazar, Nick Blaemire, and more.

Emily Gardner Xu Hall is a composer-lyricist, playwright and actor whose writing focuses on feminist perspectives inclusive to people of colour. For her musical theatre writing, she won the “Go Write a Musical” Lilly Award for a Female Composer-Lyricist with supervision from Broadway producer Stacey Mindich. Book/music/lyrics (adaptations): UNTITLED CHERRY ORCHARD MUSICAL (Musical Theatre Factory), CYMBELINE. Book/music/lyrics (original): I AM THIS FOR YOU (Ars Nova ANT Fest), NASCENT PHASE (Bushwick Starr). Collaborations (musicals and plays) include NOMAD MOTEL (with Carla Ching, Atlantic Theatre Company), BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL… (with Kareem M. Lucas, Public Theater Under the Radar Festival), THE CARDINAL (with Cusi Cram, Cornerstone Theatre Company), RUTH BADER GINSBERG PROJECT (with Dianne Nora, Goodman Theatre). She has developed work at Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project, New York SongSpace, CATWALK residency, and is an alum of New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio and a member of the BMI workshop. BA Music and English, Wellesley College; MFA, NYU Graduate Acting Program.

Julia Gytri is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her theatrical works include BLIND (National Asian Artists Project 2013, with Yan Li), SALONIKA (The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, with Avi Amon), and THE WHITE CITY (O’Neill National Music Theatre Conference 2014, Richard Rogers Award Finalist 2015, Musical Theatre Factory New Orchestrations 2015, Yale Institute 2016). Julia has enjoyed artistic residencies at The Weston Playhouse (2016, 2018) and had works performed at Lincoln Center, 54 Below, The Prospect Theatre, and universities across the country. Current projects include two novels: THIS IS THE UNIVERSAL SIGN FOR CHOKING and THE GHOST SAYS “BOO”: A LAWSON FAMILY CHRISTMAS, as well as a new play, THE GRAND MOSQUE AT ABU DHABI. When Julia’s not working on theatre or fiction, she writes everything from educational music for kids to marketing materials in her current role as Head of Brand Content + Communication for a New York-based sports nutrition company.

Avi Amon is a composer, sound artist, and educator. His music has been heard at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Ars Nova, Atlantic Theater, BAM, Drama League, Edinburgh Fringe, Exponential Festival, JACK, Juilliard, Lincoln Center, La Mama, Prospect Theater, and Spoleto Festival USA, among others. With Julia Gytri he has developed SALONIKA (Berkeley REP Ground Floor) and THE WHITE CITY (Yale Institute, O’Neill NMTC, Richard Rogers Award Finalist). Other credits include: RATED BLACK with Kareem Lucas (New York Theater Workshop), JEUNE TERRE with Gabrielle Reisman (Playwrights Center), and several sound installations in a 100-year old grain silo in Buffalo, NY. In development: INSHALLAH/MASHALLAH, a 3-D audio opera (Target Margin Theater), PAUL SWAN IS DEAD AND GONE with Claire Kiechel (Civilians), and THE BLACK HISTORY MUSEUM with Zoey Martinson (HERE Arts Center). He has been in-residence with Exploring the Metropolis at JCAL, Hi-ARTS, Judson, New Dramatists, Target Margin, Weston Playhouse, and Yale. Avi is the resident composer at the 52nd Street Project and teaches at NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

Ben Wexler is a composer, lyricist and teaching artist. Music and lyrics: WASHINGTON SQUARE (book, Kirsten Childs), and THE ORCHESTRA (Whitman/Grove Theatricals commission); music for SHIP SHOW (Yale Institute), SPEECH AND DEBATE (Sycamore Pictures) and THE INSURGENTS (LAByrinth). Ben is the Artistic Director of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, which merges Broadway Artists, justice-oriented organizations, and policy experts. Projects include collaborations with New York City Council, Alliance for Quality Education, and Columbia Law School, where he is an adjunct lecturer. Ben is resident composer for A Broader Way, an arts empowerment program founded by Idina Menzel and Jeanine Tesori. Ben served as the associate to Ms. Tesori for Encores: Off-Center and FUN HOME, VIOLET, and SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, all on Broadway. Ben has trained through New Dramatists, BMI (Harrington Award, 2013) and was a 2014-15 Dramatists Guild Fellow. B.A: Yale.

Jay Adana is a singer songwriter based out of Brooklyn. She was the lyricist for The Woodsman (New World Stages, 59E59, ARS Nova) directed and conceived by James Ortiz and Strangemen and Co. She also contributed music and lyrics to Jeff Augustin's The Last Tiger in Haiti (Berkeley Rep, La Jolla Playhouse). She was a member of the second cohort of #BARS at the Public Theater (created by Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal) where she first met and collaborated with writing partner Zeniba Britt on an adaptation of Beloved by Toni Morrison. She is currently developing an American Civil War Musical called The Loophole, book by Zeniba Britt. It was workshopped at the Public Theater under the supervision of Jeanie O'Hare in August 2017 and then again in November 2017. BFA SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Theater Arts and Film.

http://www.jayadana.com/

Emily Kaczmarek is a NYC-based writer, teacher, and performer. Works include: SAM & LIZZIE (First Floor Theatre, 2018 NPC Semifinalist), AFLOAT (with Zoe Sarnak; Prospect Theatre Company, WP Theatre Pipeline Festival), AFTERWORDS (with Zoe Sarnak; Village Theatre Beta Series, Village Originals Festival of New Musicals, Playwrights Horizons–Musical Theatre Factory workshop, NYMF Developmental Reading), AMERICAN KIDS (City Theatre ShortCuts, BoxFest Detroit), LANDED, ALMA MATER and HOLD YOUR PEACE (with Zoe Sarnak; New York Film Academy commissions), PAPER & GLUE (Future of Storytelling Conference, various high schools in NY and CA), and ANYTHING NEW (NYU commission, Wombat Theatre Co). Residencies include: SPACE on Ryder Farm, Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center, Goodspeed Musicals. Awards include: 2018 Kleban Prize Finalist, 2017 Premiere Stages Play Festival Semifinalist. She also teaches writing to high schoolers through the college access program SEO Scholars, and sings whenever possible. Education: New York University. http://emilykaczmarek.com/

Zoe Sarnak’s works include: Secret Soldiers (with Marsha Norman, Williamstown Theatre Festival Commission), Afterwords (with Emily Kaczmarek, Village Theatre Beta Series Production), Afloat (with Emily Kaczmarek, WP Pipeline Festival), The Years Between (with Kirsten Guenther, T-Fellowship lab), Galileo (with Danny Strong, Michael Weiner and dir. Michael Mayer), Teddy & Max (with Brian Crawley), Landed, Alma Mater, and Hold Your Peace (with Emily Kaczmarek, NYFA commissions) and Transport Group’s 20th Century Commission (with Michele Lowe). Awards include: Fred Ebb Award finalist, two time Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award finalist, NY Stage & Film’s Founders Award finalist, Davenport Contest Winner, Women’s Project Lab Artist. Residencies include: The Public Theater at Vineyards Arts, Goodspeed, Williamstown Theatre Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, McCarter Theater Residency, Eugene O’Neill Artist Residency, and Rhinebeck Writers Retreat. Music featured: NY Times Live, Lilly Awards, and more. Education: Harvard University. http://www.zoesarnak.com

Andrew R. Butler is a writer, composer and performer based in Brooklyn, NY and hailing from the Florida Panhandle. He has written four musicals with playwright Andrew Farmer: the Floridian folk tale Finn The Fearless; the southern gothic Blessing; an adaptation of Kate DiCamillo's The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (TheatreWorksUSA commission); and the episodic musical travelogue American Cryptids. Also, (PARKLAND/WEATHERS) (Ars Nova), music/lyrics for Anna Kerrigan's The Dixon Family Album (Williamstown Theatre Festival's Sagal Fellowship); co-music/lyrics for Jaclyn Backhaus's Folk Wandering; co-writer/performer for Political Subversities (Joe's Pub); co-founder of experimental theatre company harunalee (Ars Nova's Makers Lab; The Public's Under The Radar Festival; LaMama; Bushwick Starr). Alumnus of Ars Nova's Uncharted Music/Theater Writers Group, Yale Institute for Music Theatre, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Polyphone Festival at UArts, Civilian's R&D Group, FGP's Playground Playgroup, Guild Hall's JDT Lab, and Aspen Theatre Festival. Andrew holds a BFA in Drama from NYU's Experimental Theatre Wing. www.andrewrbutler.com

Andrew Duncan Farmer is a writer, performer, comedian and storyteller based in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. His work has been produced at MoMA, Ars Nova, The Williamstown Theatre Festival, Guild Hall, The UCB and The Yale School of Drama, amongst others. With Andrew R. Butler he has developed BLESSING (Yale Institute for Music Theatre, Playwrights Horizons Downtown commission), The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (TheatreworksUSA commission), Finn the Fearless (Ars Nova Residency, Theatre Aspen, Polyphone Music Festival) and American Cryptids (The Civilians R&D Group.) Recent plays include The Gray Man (Pipeline Theatre Company), The Fall of Hotel Mudafier...(Williamstown Theatre Festival), and I Heard Sex Noises, written with Claire Rothrock, Ryann Weir & Annie Tippe (Ars Nova Residency). Andrew's stories have appeared in Vogue, New York Magazine, The Moth and The Huffington Post. He's a member of The Story Pirates along with comedy groups Gentlemen Party and Political Subversities. He holds a BFA in Drama from Playwrights Horizons Theater School at NYU's Tisch School of The Arts. www.AndrewDuncanFarmer.com

Mark Sonnenblick is a composer, lyricist, and librettist, although not always at the same time. Collaborations include MIDNIGHT AT THE NEVER GET (Bistro Award, MAC Award Nominee "Show of the Year"), INDEPENDENTS ("Best Production" FringeNYC), DRAGONS LOVE TACOS (TheatreworksUSA), TWENTY MINUTES OR LESS (Washington National Opera), SHIP SHOW (Yale Institute for Music Theatre), STOMPCAT IN LAWNDALE (Ars Nova Ant Fest), WHEEL OF MISFORTUNE (Denver Center for the Performing Arts), and BUNKERVILLE (BSU Discovery Festival). Mark was a Dramatists Guild Fellow (with composer Ben Wexler) and has developed work at The Johnny Mercer Writers Colony (Goodspeed Musicals), UCross Foundation, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, The John Duffy Institute (Virginia Arts Festival), Composers and the Voice (American Opera Projects), and The Johnny Mercer Songwriting Project. He is very grateful for his teachers, collaborators, friends, and family. http://www.marksonnenblick.com/

Ben Bonnema is a composer-lyricist whose work has been featured in Variety, Wired and The New York Times. He wrote book, music & lyrics to Adult Swim's Peter Panic, a musical video game that's been downloaded by over a half million people (developed by James Marion). He contributed additional composition to Punchdrunk's award-winning show Sleep No More. His slumber party musical, Boys Who Tricked Me, was called "heart-healing musical theatre" by Joshua Barone of the New York Times. Other full-length: One Way (with Christopher Staskel), The Apple Boys (book by Jonothon Lyons), and The Lost Girl (with Arianna Rose). He supplied additional orchestrations for Ana Gasteyer's album I'M HIP. Ben holds a B.A. in Music Composition from Whitworth University and an M.F.A. from NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. He won the 2011 ASCAP Foundation Frederick Loewe Award. He is currently Marc Shaiman's music assistant. http://www.benbonnema.com/

Maggie-Kate Coleman grew up on Happy Day Farm (Keedysville, MD) and is now an NYC-based playwright, bookwriter, and lyricist: Book & lyrics for POP! -music by Anna K. Jacobs- (Yale Rep ,Pittsburgh City Theatre, Studio Theatre DC, etc.)  POP! received three Connecticut Critics Circle Awards, seven Helen Hayes Award nominations, and was a Pittsburgh Tribune Top Ten choice of 2012. Other recent: The Map of Lost Things (Hangar Theatre, Ithaca), and with Erato A. Kremmyda, lyrics for Field Trip: A Climate Cabaret (Superhero Clubhouse NYC), Hotel Mediteranee (Between The Seas Festival/Wild Project), The Way They Live (The Civilians at the Met) and more.  Current work: Marie in Tomorrowland with Erato A. Kremmyda and Sam Pinkleton, developed through The Civilians R&D Group, The Orchard Project, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, and Catwalk Institute. MacDowell Fellow 2015, MFA NYU Musical Theatre Writing, BA Ithaca College, NTI SP05.

Erato A. Kremmyda is a NYC based composer born and raised in Athens, Greece. Current work: Marie in Tomorrowland (with Maggie-Kate Coleman and Sam Pinkleton) developed at Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Catwalk Institute, The Orchard Project, SPACE on Ryder Farm, and The Civilians R&D Group. Recent: Riot Antigone by Seonjae Kim (La Mama), Wagon Wheel with Robin Sandusky (Planet Connections). Recent with Maggie-Kate Coleman: Worth of Women (Carnegie Hall/Kairos Italy Theater); The Way They Live (The Met/The Civilians); Hotel Mediteranee (Wild Project/Between The Seas Festival); Field Trip: A Climate Cabaret (Superhero Clubhouse, NYC). Erato has been a guest composer at Yale and Columbia, is a Fulbright Fellow, and an Anna Sosenko Trust grant recipient. Her compositions have been heard at Megaron (Athens), Joe’s Pub, Ars Nova, NYMF, BRIC, HERE, Irondale, Teatro Duo (Rome), Bios (Athens) etc. MFA NYU (Musical Theater Writing, Dean’s scholar), MM NYU (Film Scoring), Athens University, Athens Conservatoire. http://www.eratoakremmyda.com/

Ty Defoe (Giizhig), a lyricist, book writer/playwright, and performer from the Oneida and Ojibwe Nations. Credits: Clouds are Pillows for the Moon (Yale Institute for Music Theatre, ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop, Kilroy’s Honorable Mention List), Hart Island Requiem (Civilians R&D), Red Pine (Native Voices at the Autry; Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe), The Way They Live (Co-collaboration with The Civilians at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Heather Henson’s Crane: On Earth, In Sky (Ibex Puppetry at La MaMa Theater, NYC). Developing: Gender Nation, Crossing Borders (CAP21 Residency), Sunrise Prayer (Johnny Mercer Writers Colony) and Yellow Cycle. Participated in 2015 Johnny Mercer Songwriter Project, 2016 Robert Rauschenberg Residency. Concerts at 54 Below, Joe’s Pub, Bruner Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center in NYC, and toured Greece, Japan, Turkey at Ankara’s International Music Festival, and Festival of World Cultures in Dubai. Member of ASCAP and Dramatists Guild. Alum of CalArts, Goddard, and NYU’s Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program. He/Him tydefoe.com
Tidtaya Sinutoke (ฑิตยา สินุธก) is a Thai born, NYC-based composer, writer, and musician. Her works include themes of self-discovery, gender issues, travel, social injustice and companionship. Composition credits include: Clouds are Pillows for the Moon (Yale Institute for Music Theatre, ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop, Kilroy’s Honorable Mention List), Hart Island Requiem (Civilians R&D, EtM Con Edison Composer-in-Residence), Gender Nation, Crossing Borders (CAP21 Residency), Sunrise Prayer (Johnny Mercer Writers Colony) and Yellow Cycle. She participated in the 2014 Composer-Librettists Studio at New Dramatists, the 2015 Johnny Mercer Songwriter Projects, the 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) IAM Mentoring Program, the 2016 Robert Rauschenberg Residency and the 2016-2017 Etm Con Edison Composer-in-Residence. A proud member of ASCAP, and the Dramatists Guild. MFA: NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. tidtayasinutoke.com

Michael R. Jackson holds a BFA and MFA in playwriting and Musical Theatre Writing from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. As a songwriter, he has seen his work performed at NAMT, The 24 Hour Musicals, The Barrington Stage Company, Merkin Hall, The Laurie Beechman Theater, Feinstein’s/54 Below, The Triad, Ars Nova, Joe’s Pub, The Metropolitan Room, The Bruno Walter Library, and ACT in Seattle. He wrote book, music, and lyrics for the musical A Strange Loop. He wrote book and lyrics for the musical Only Children with composer Rachel Peters, book and lyrics for the musical adaptation of the 2007 horror film Teeth with composer and co-bookwriter Anna Jacobs, and is currently writing book for the musical U.G.L.Y. with composer-lyricist Darius Smith. He is an alum of the Johnny Mercer Writers Colony, the Ars Nova Uncharted Writers Group, and is a Sundance Theatre Institute Composer Fellow. He is Jonathan Larson Award 2016 Finalist and is a 2016-2017 Dramatist Guild Fellow. www.facebook.com/ thelivingmichaeljackson, www.youtube.com/michaelrj1981, www.thelivingmichaeljackson. com.

CÉSAR ALVAREZ is a composer, lyricist, performer and writer. César's band, The Lisps, has released 4 albums and played hundreds of shows around the country since 2005. Recent composition credits: FUTURITY directed by Sarah Benson (Soho Rep/Ars Nova, A.R.T, Walker Art Center, Mass MoCA); Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' An Octoroon (Soho Rep, TFANA. Drama Desk Nomination); Washeteria (Soho Rep); The Foundry Theater's Good Person of Szechwan (LaMaMa, Public Theater. Drama Desk Nomination); Mac Wellman's 3 2's; or AFAR (Dixon Place), Full Still Hungry for Contra-Tiempo (Ford Amphitheater, Dance Motion USA). In development: The Universe is a Small Hat, a multi-player participatory musical (Berkeley Rep Ground Floor, Civilians R&D Group, PRELUDE NYC, Babycastles, Sarah Lawrence College), The Elementary Spacetime Show (Ars Nova Uncharted, EST/Sloan Commission, Polyphone Festival) and Castro with Lucas Hnath (Berkeley Rep Ground Floor and Space at Ryder Farm). César is an Artist-in-Residence at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and the Artistic Director of Polyphone, a festival of the emerging musical at UArts. He is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and received his MFA at Bard College. www.musicisfreenow.org

Bio as of March 2016.

SAM SALMOND is a Brooklyn-based composer, lyricist, and bookwriter. He’s currently writing music and lyrics for an adaptation of Eighty-Sixed, the novel by humorist and AIDS activist, David Feinberg. The show recently had a developmental reading at Second Stage Theatre. He’s the creator of Uncool: the Party, an immersive night of rock 'n roll, games, stories, and dancing, which was workshopped at CAP21 and the Musical Theatre Factory. His musical Mother, Me and the Monsters was produced at Barrington Stage. He wrote book and lyrics for Cage Match, produced at Prospect Theater, and contributed songs to Shakina Nayfack’s One Woman Show and Post-Op, produced at Palo Alto Theatreworks and The Wild Project. Sam’s work has been featured at Lincoln Center, Ars Nova, Symphony Space, Joe's Pub, 54 Below, Two Rivers Theater and all around the country. He’s an alumnus of NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

CARSON KREITZER is a 2015/16 McKnight Fellow in Playwriting at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, her third time receiving the honor. Current projects include Capital Crime!, a commission for the Guthrie Theatre, and Lempicka, a new musical with composer Matt Gould. Her plays include The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Rosenthal New Play Prize, American Theatre Critics' Steinberg New Play Citation, and Barrie Stavis Award; published in Smith and Kraus' New Playwrights: Best Plays of 2004), SELF DEFENSE or death of some salesmen, Flesh and the Desert, The Slow Drag (New York and London), Slither, Behind the Eye, and Lasso of Truth (NNPN Rolling World Premiere). Ms. Kreitzer is a member of the Workhaus Collective, an alumna of New Dramatists, and was the first Playwrights Of New York (PoNY) Fellow at the Lark Play Development Center. Her collection SELF DEFENSE and other plays is available from No Passport Press.

NIKKO BENSON is a musical theater writer and performer. Creator of numerous original musicals and cabarets, he is currently developing Nikola Tesla Drops The Beat (with Benjamin Halstead), an electronic musical that received development residencies with the Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project and Johnny Mercer Writers Colony, as well as presentations at Musical Theatre Factory and Joe’s Pub. Based in New York, he and his songs have been featured at cabaret venues around the city, among them Brian Stokes Mitchell’s Plays With Music and William Finn’s Ridiculously Talented series, and his own concert evenings Start Again and In Pursuit of Magic. A founding member of the Musical Theater Factory, Nikko is also a teaching artist at The Performing Arts Project, and a member of ASCAP and the Dramatists’ Guild.

Max Vernon is a composer/lyricist, playwright, and performer. Described by the New Yorker as "equal parts bohemia and Broadway," his work has been performed and developed at Ars Nova, Theatreworks USA, Naked Angels, New Dramatists, Two River Theater (NJ), Dixon Place, Woodshed Collective, Ma-Yi, LaMaMa, and Pride Films and Plays (Chicago), among others. This past year he was a Dramatist Guild Theatre Fellow, an artist in residence at Rhinebeck Writer's Retreat, a JFund award recipient, and also finished his first commission for Disney Creative Entertainment. He is currently a member of Ars Nova's Uncharted, as well as the Civilians R&D Group. He has performed over a hundred concerts in New York City, including sold out shows at Joe's Pub (Frisk Me: The Songs of Max Vernon) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Civilians' Let Me Ascertain You). His musicals include The View UpStairs (NYU, Pride Films and Plays) and WIRED (Ars Nova) Developing: Co-Op (Ars Nova, Naked Angels Radio); Aesop's Fables (Theatreworks USA); WAM! Entertainment (Ars Nova/Ma-Yi); Show & Tell (Jerome Foundation, Civilians R&D Group) MFA: NYU-Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

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See music from Max

Sam Willmott is a NYC-based composer/lyricist, whose projects include Bhangin' It (with Rehana Lew Mirza and Mike Lew); Yo, Vikings! (with Marcus Stevens, published by Samuel French); the mini-musical Scarlet Takes a Tumble; and Standardized Testing - The Musical!!!! (published by Playscripts, Inc.), among others. He is the recipient of the 2013 ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award for Lyrics, the 2012 Fred Ebb Award, the 2012 John Wallowitch Award, and the 2009 Kennedy Center ACTF Musical Theater Award, and has been a writer-in-residence at Goodspeed Musicals (2014, 2013) and the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center (2013).  Sam is also a proud contributor for English Egg, a Korea-based children's language program.

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See music from Sam

Tim Rosser and Charlie Sohne are 2014-15 Dramatist Guild Fellows. Together, they have written: The Boy Who Danced on Air (2013 NAMT Festival of New Works and Writers Residency Grant, 2013 Rodgers Award Finalist, 2013 ART/NY and NYTB Workshop), The Profit of Creation (2011 Yale Institute for Musical Theater, developed through ASCAP’s 2010 Johnny Mercer Songwriters Program) and the short musical Political Speeches (The Culture Project’s IMPACT Series). Their work has been seen in a sold-out 54 Below Show, at Birdland, Cutting Edge Composers at Joe’s Pub, A Little New Music at Rockwell in L.A, Contemporary Classics at Seattle Rep, The Holiday Concert at the Lincoln Center Library and others. They were members of the Advanced Class of the BMI Workshop.

Separately, Charlie has developed work at New York Stage and Film, the O’Neill National Music Theater Conference, The Lark and the Cherry Lane Theater – and has had his work sung in concert at Second Stage (DCMTW’s The Concert) and through BMI’s Smoker and Showcase. His song I’m Just Glad You’re Here (music by David Gaines) was named one of the Top 25 Songs in the Directory of Contemporary Musical Theater Writers.

Tim has music directed the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS benefit BROADWAY BACKWARDS at the Palace and Al Hirschfeld Theaters and was the Associate Music Director of I AM HARVEY MILK at Avery Fischer Hall. He has played keyboards for ROCKY and THE ADDAMS FAMILY on Broadway and CARRIE at the Lucille Lortel and he's played rehearsals for A GENTLEMAN'S GUIDE... on Broadway, and City Center's ENCORES series.

See music from Tim and Charlie

Sara Cooper is a bookwriter, lyricist, and playwright. With composer Zach Redler, Sara wrote The Memory Show, which was produced Off-Broadway by Transport Group and won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2013, and Loving Leo, which had its first workshop production this past summer at Weston Playhouse after winning the Weston Playhouse New Musical Award in 2012. The Memory Show was developed at the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at New York University and also ran in Seoul, South Korea, was in the NAMT Festival of New Musicals, and had its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company as a part of William Finn's Musical Theatre Lab.

Sara and Zach have also written several opera pieces and are currently writing their third full-length musical together, Putting Off Goodbye. Sara's other musicals have appeared in the NYMF Next Link Project, in the New York International Fringe Festival, and at Theater for the New City. Sara's play Things I Left On Long Island has had several readings Off-Off-Broadway in the past year after winning a grant from the Queens Council on the Arts. As an educator, Sara has taught for organizations including New York University, City College, Theater for the New City, and Lincoln Center.

Website

Zach Redler is a composer, pianist, vocal coach, music copyist, musicologist, a member of ASCAP and Local 802 and a graduate of Tisch's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, at which he met bookwriter/lyricist Sara Cooper. Zach's research and study of Auschwitz victim Marcel Tyberg's life and music has culminated in eight world premieres and two distinguished grants. Zach is currently preparing and editing Tyberg's entire body of works for Boosey and Hawkes. In addition to vocal coaching at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, Zach is adjunct faculty teaching courses at both the Tisch School of the Arts and Steinhardt. Zach's first musical, Perez Hilton Saves the Universe written with Tim Drucker and Randy Blair, won Best Musical Fringe Festival 2008 and Best Musical in the Talkin' Broadway 2008 Summer Theatre Festival Citations.

Zach and Sara Cooper's first musical together, The Memory Show, began as their thesis project at Tisch in 2009. After the world premiere production at Barrington Stage (2010) and a nine-month run in Seoul (2012), last spring Transport Group produced it at the Duke Theater in New York for which they won an NEA Grant. Readings with the Adirondack Theater Festival (2010), Sharon Playhouse (2011) and Contemporary Traditionalists (2011) helped shape Zach and Sara's Loving Leo.

In 2012, Loving Leo won the Weston Playhouse Award and The Weston Playhouse produced its first workshop production this past summer. Zach and Sara's operatic works include a set of six monodramas (Windows) and four chamber operas (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Male Identity) that were created in part at the Virginia Arts Festival (2011), NYU (2012) and through a two year Van Lier residency with American Opera Projects (2011-13). Zach has also written many sets of art songs with texts by 19th century American poets. This spring, Opera Memphis will premiere his and librettist Jerre Dye's monodrama Movin' Up in the World (part of Ghosts of Crosstown) and an excerpt from Zach and librettist Mark Campbell's new opera about Susan Smith will be performed at the Virginia Arts Festival. Currently, in addition to writing their third musical, Putting Off Goodbye, Zach and Sara are crowd sourcing for The Memory Show cast album that grammy nominated Michael Croiter of Yellow Sound Label will produce this summer.

Website

See highlights from the grant presentation here.

See music from Zach and Sara here.

Raised in the green mountains of Vermont, Shaina Taub is a songwriter and performer. Her band, the Shaina Taub Trio, plays regularly in New York. Shaina was Ars Nova's 2012 Composer-in-Residence, and her debut album, What Otters Do, was featured on NPR/WNYC's Best of 2011 list. She's currently writing the scores for two new musicals: There's A House, with playwright Kim Rosenstock, commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Robin, with playwright Jen Silverman, commissioned by Ars Nova. She recently signed a publishing deal with Razor & Tie and Ghostlight / Sh-K-Boom records, as the first artist in their new joint venture to represent songwriters that fuse theatrical and pop music. Her original soul-folk opera, The Daughters, has been developed by the Yale Institute of Music Theatre and was a finalist for the Richard Rodgers Award. She recently played Princess Mary in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, and is currently performing in A.R.T.'s upcoming new production of Shakespeare's The Tempest. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Yaddo Colony and the Sundance Institute, and is an alum of NYU'S Tisch School of the Arts.

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See highlights from the grant presentation here.

Read her New York Times profile here.

Buy her new album 'Visitors' here.

Joshua Salzman (music) and Ryan Cunningham (book and lyrics) are Drama Desk and MAC Award-nominated writers. Their Off-Broadway musical, I Love You Because, has been produced all over the world and translated into Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Finnish. Their new musical, Next Thing You Know, was produced at CAP21 in New York with the help of a grant from NAMT and has gone on to be produced across America and in Europe. The cast album is now available on Yellow Sound Label. They continue their collaboration with a musical about the '77 New York City blackout called The Legend of New York. Ryan and Joshua are graduates of the NYU graduate musical theatre writing program and are both members of ASCAP and the Dramatist Guild.

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Bio as of February, 2013.

See highlights from the grant presentation here.

See music from Joshua and Ryan here.

Praised as "strikingly original" (NY Times), Kamala Sankaram has written music for theater, film, and concert. She has received residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Watermill Center, and the Hermitage, and was the 2011 Con Edison/Exploring the Metropolis Composer-in-Residence at the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Academy. Her music for SOUNDING (directed by Kristin Marting) was praised as "gorgeous pop-rock interludes" (Time Out NY). As a resident artist at HERE Arts Center, Kamala created MIRANDA, a steampunk murder mystery which was was named winner of the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical. Also a performer, Kamala has collaborated with the Wooster Group, the Philip Glass Ensemble, and Anthony Braxton, among others.

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Bio as of February, 2013.

See highlights from the grant presentation here.

See music from Kamala here.

With composer Julianne Wick Davis, Dan Collins wrote book and lyrics for the musical SOUTHERN COMFORT, which received a reading at Playwrights Horizons, a workshop production at CAP 21 (both directed by Thomas Caruso), and was nominated for a 2011 GLAAD Media Award and selected as one of The Advocate Magazine's 10 best shows of 2011. Other works with Julianne Wick Davis include: WOOD (NYMF, starring Tony Award Winner Cady Huffman); OUR LADY OF THE VIADUCT and TIME TO KILL (The York Theatre Company); and WHEN WE MET, co-conceived with performers Sally Wilfert and Michael Winther. Other recent projects include Book for OUR COUNTRY with composer/lyricist Tony Asaro (produced at NYMF and Planet Connections Theater Festivity where it was honored with awards for "Best Book" and "Best Musical") and lyrics for PROFESSOR VON AWESOME'S TRAVELING CARAVAN OF CAUTIONARY WARNINGS and JOHNNY 15, both with composer Nick Sula and "The Serious Theater Collective". Dan's work has been published in Plays and Playwrights 2010 (NYTE Small Press) and he was selected along with Julianne Wick Davis as a 2011/2012 Dramatist Guild Fellow. Dan holds an M.F.A. in Musical Theater Writing at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU and a B.F.A. in Playwriting from The Theater School of DePaul University.

Bio as of March, 2012.

Julianne Wick Davis, composer/lyricist, wrote music for SOUTHERN COMFORT with Dan Collins (book & lyrics), based on the Sundance award-winning documentary of the same name. SOUTHERN COMFORT received a developmental reading at Playwrights Horizons in 2010, and a workshop production at Cap21 in 2011, which was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. WOOD (music) with Dan Collins (book & lyrics) was chosen as part of the 2008 New York Musical Theatre Festival Next Link Series. Julianne also wrote both music and lyrics for WHEN WE MET with Dan Collins (book), which received developmental readings at the Tri-Arts Playhouse and Williams College Summer Theatre Lab. Other work with Dan Collins includes OUR LADY OF THE VIADUCT and TIME TO KILL for York Theatre's 4@15 series. Julianne's work has been featured in the Broadway's Future @ Lincoln Center, and also at Joe's Pub and Merkin Hall. She is a recent graduate from NYU's Tisch Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, is a proud ASCAP member, and was named a Dramatist Guild Fellow for 2011-2012.

Bio as of March, 2012.

See highlights from the grant presentation here.

Joshua H. Cohen's lyrics (and sometimes music or book) include Maggie the Pirate (Winner, Chameleon Theatre Circle; upcoming workshops Momentum Rep, WKU Before Broadway), Tamar and the River (Signature Theatre), Keep On Walkin' (Amas/Actors' Harbor), Speargrove Presents (contributing writer; NY Theatre Barn), Still Life With Toe Shoes (workshop, Old Deerfield Productions; production, Musical Theatre Society of Emerson College), The Entropy Songs (Abingdon Theatre; upcoming, Libra Theatre), and The Day the World Went QUEER! (NY Fringe). One-acts: American Globe, Turtle Shell, Prospect, others. 2010 MAC nomination, "Sacrifice of Love." Plays include full-length Fun and Games (Little Hibiscus) and one-act "Odysseus Swims For It" (publication, Smith & Kraus). Collaborators include composers Marisa Michelson and Lavell Blackwell, playwrights James Armstrong and Jonathan Matthew Gilbert, and singer/essayist/raconteur Brooke Ferris. Managing Director, Blue Room Arts Collective; member of the Dramatists Guild; 2008-10 Fellow, American Lyric Theatre's Composer-Librettist Development Program. BA: Amherst College, MFA: NYU-GMTWP.

Bio as of March, 2011.

Marisa Michelson composes with a particular emphasis on exploring the voice as a multi-faceted instrument of human expression. Her work includes book and music for Tamar and the River (commissioned by the Signature Theatre thanks to the Shen Family Foundation Next Generation grant, written with Joshua H. Cohen) which had its workshop production last summer and is slated for Signature's 2012 season; Still Life with Toe Shoes (Old Deerfield Productions; production Musical Theatre Society of Emerson College); Hotel Sarajevo (CAP 21, hotInk Festival, Smith College), and commissioned one-acts for NYC's Prospect Theatre Company. In May, 2010, Marisa was commissioned with playwright Jason Grote by Montclair University's New Works Institute to write Scheherezade1001. She is the winner of the 2006 St. Botolph Award for Composition and a Global Arts Village grant to study Indian Hindustani Singing in India. She was a proud participant in the New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, Theatreworks Palo Alto's 2011 writers residency, and Earthdance's 2011 "eMerge" interdisciplinary artists residency in Western Massachusetts. Marisa sang with Meredith Monk in Songs of Ascension at BAM, and will be singing in Daria Fain's Phoneme Choir. She teaches singing through Soyulla artists and privately in Washington Heights.

Bio as of March, 2011.

Michelle Elliott (bookwriter & co-lyricist) and Danny Larsen (composer & co-lyricist) and met and began collaborating while attending NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Their first musical, The Yellow Wood, received the 2006 Richard Rodgers Development Award and the Daryl Roth Award. The Yellow Wood was presented as part of the 2007 New York Musical Theatre Festival and was part of the National Alliance of Musical Theatre Festival in October 2008. Their most recent collaboration, Cloaked, received a workshop production at CAP 21 in June 2010 and was presented as part of the Village Theatre's Festival of New Works in August 2010. Proud members of ASCAP, Danny and Michelle are currently devising several new works. While at NYU, Michelle was the recipient of the Tisch Achievement Award. Michelle also has a Master's in Directing from the University of Wisconsin - Superior, where she received the Excellence in Directing Award. Michelle was the co-founder and Artistic Director of Frontier Theatre in Minneapolis, where she wrote, directed and produced six original musicals.

Bio as of March, 2011.

Danny Larsen (composer & co-lyricist) and Michelle Elliott (bookwriter & co-lyricist) met and began collaborating while attending NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Their first musical, The Yellow Wood, received the 2006 Richard Rodgers Development Award and the Daryl Roth Award. The Yellow Wood was presented as part of the 2007 New York Musical Theatre Festival and was part of the National Alliance of Musical Theatre Festival in October 2008. Their most recent collaboration, Cloaked, received a workshop production at CAP 21 in June 2010 and was presented as part of the Village Theatre's Festival of New Works in August 2010. Proud members of ASCAP, Danny and Michelle are currently devising several new works. Danny holds Bachelors of Arts degrees in Music and Theatre Education from Brigham Young University. He won the ACTF Kennedy Center Composition award for his music and lyrics for Soft Shoe, a new musical comedy, which premiered at BYU in 2002. He also won the Excellence in Music Award for The Yellow Wood at the New York Theatre Musical Theatre Festival in 2007. He has done an extensive amount of arranging, orchestration, and composing for various projects and is also a director, music director and performer.

Bio as of March, 2011.

Jack Lechner (lyrics), Andy Monroe (music), and Michael Zam (book) received the 2009 Jerry Bock Award and a 2010 GLAAD Media Award nomination for The Kid, which premiered at the Acorn Theater in New York in May 2010. The show is adapted from the memoir by sex columnist Dan Savage, creator of the "It Gets Better" project. Jack Lechner writes lyrics, produces for film and TV, teaches film at NYU, constructs puzzles, and sometimes writes books (including Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You and Mary Had A Little Lamp). His credits as an executive producer include Blue Valentine (Oscar nominee), Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, The Fog Of War (Oscar winner), Left Of The Dial (Emmy nominee), Sunset Daze, Parking Lot, Very Young Girls, Naked On the Inside, Smile 'Til It Hurts, and the upcoming Growing Small. He was a producer on the pilot for Mad Men, and an executive on such films as The Crying Game, Good Will Hunting, and The Full Monty. He is a member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, where he received the 2004 Jerry Harrington Award.

Bio as of March, 2011.

Andy Monroe (music), Jack Lechner (lyrics), and Michael Zam (book) received the 2009 Jerry Bock Award and a 2010 GLAAD Media Award nomination for The Kid, which premiered at the Acorn Theater in New York in May 2010. The show is adapted from the memoir by sex columnist Dan Savage, creator of the "It Gets Better" project. Andy Monroe is currently writing book, music, and lyrics for an original musical called Drive. He wrote music and lyrics for The Tragic And Horrible Life Of The Singing Nun (book and additional lyrics by Blair Fell), which was presented in the 2006 New York Musical Theater Festival. He has twice participated in the 4A15 program at the York Theatre, which produced his short musicals Sally Peaches in April 2009, and Elevator Music in March 2011. Andy's short musical The Life And Times Of Joe Jefferson Benjamin Blow has been produced regionally. With lyricist Jack Lechner, he wrote a song for the HBO special A Family Is A Family Is a Family, which was performed by Rosie O'Donnell. He is the recipient of the 2001 BMI Foundation Jerry Harrington Musical Theater Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement, and was a 2007-8 Dramatists Guild Fellow.

Bio as of March, 2011.

Michael Zam (book), Andy Monroe (music), and Jack Lechner (lyrics) received the 2009 Jerry Bock Award and a 2010 GLAAD Media Award nomination for The Kid, which premiered at the Acorn Theater in New York in May 2010. The show is adapted from the memoir by sex columnist Dan Savage, creator of the "It Gets Better" project. Michael Zam is a screenwriter whose recent credits include Best Actress, in development with Plan B, which was featured on the 2009 Black List of best unproduced screenplays; Wife Vs. Ninja for DreamWorks; a remake of the Jerry Lewis classic The Family Jewels (all with Jaffe Cohen); and Selfish & Perverse for director Jerry Mitchell. Michael teaches screenwriting at NYU and Modern British Drama at NYU in London (Teaching Excellence Award, 1998 and 2007). He also created the successful Professional Certificate in Screenwriting, the first on the East Coast. He is a former American Film Institute Fellow, and an alumnus of BMI's Librettists Workshop.

Bio as of March, 2011.

Peter Lerman is currently writing the music and lyrics for The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company, an original musical with Simon Rich directed by Michael Mayer. He has also has written The Virginia, a musical about a struggling guitar builder in Appalachia which was presented at the 2010 Disney/ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop. For his work in theater, Peter has won the 2011 Stephen Sondheim Young Artist Citation Award, a 2010-11 Dramatists Guild Fellowship, a 2010 Jonathan Larson Award, and the 2005 Kennedy Center-ACTF Musical Theater Award. Peter recently contributed music to the Emmy Award-winning comedy Modern Family on ABC and is now writing a musical movie based on his original concept for MTV Films with screenwriter Jennifer Maisel. Peter is the co-creative director (with Jeanine Tesori) of Camp A BroaderWay founded by Idina Menzel and Taye Diggs to teach theater skills to 11 and 12-year-old girls from underserved New York City communities. Peter is a graduate of Columbia University where he wrote music and lyrics for the Columbia Varsity Show.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Daniel Maté is the recipient of the 2013 Kleban Prize for Most Promising Musical Theatre Lyricist.  He also received the Jonathan Larson Grant and the ASCAP Foundation’s Cole Porter Award in 2010 for his music and lyrics.  With composer Will Aronson, he wrote lyrics and co-wrote the book for The Trouble With Doug, a comedic musical inspired by Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”  Doug was featured at the 2010 National Alliance for Musical Theatre Festival of New Musicals with direction by Tony-winning performer Victoria Clark, and has since been developed at Royal & Derngate (UK) and Theatreworks Silicon Valley (Palo Alto, CA.)  Maté and Aronson are currently working with bookwriter Hannah Kohl on a family musical commissioned by Chicago Shakespeare Theater.  Daniel’s acclaimed song cycle The Longing and the Short of It  was produced in Fall 2013 by the Theatre at Arts Garage in Delray Beach, Florida;  previously it has been developed at Barrington Stage (William Finn, dir.,) the Disney-ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop (Stephen Schwartz, dir.,) and Playwrights Horizons (Victoria Clark, dir..)  Daniel also wrote book, music, and lyrics for The Story Of Jo-Beth, a modern-day American retelling of the Book of Job (CAP 21, 2011; JCC in Manhattan, 2013.)

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Michael Kooman (music) and Christopher Dimond (book & lyrics) received the 2010 Jonathan Larson Grant and are the first recipients of the Lorenz Hart Award. Between them, they have received the Burton Lane Award, the Harold Adamson Award, the KC/ACTF Musical Theatre Award, a NYFA fellowship, an Anna Sosenko Grant, and numerous ASCAP Plus awards.

Their musicals include The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes (developed at the O’Neill Music Theater Conference and the Village Theater), Orphie & The Book Of Heroes (The Kennedy Center), Judge Jackie Justice (Pittsburgh CLO), Dani Girl (Exit, Pursued by a Bear; licensed by Samuel French), Golden Gate (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Homemade Fusion (London’s Ambassadors Theater, Edinburgh Fringe Festival) and Junior Claus (Orlando Repertory Theatre; licensed by Dramatic Publishing).

Michael and Chris are members of the Dramatists Guild and ASCAP, and are proud alumni of Carnegie Mellon University. They were Dramatists Guild Fellows, received a fellowship at the O’Neill National Music Theater Conference, and attended the Johnny Mercer Songwriting workshop. In addition, they founded the ASCAP Foundation Musical Theater Songwriting Project, a program dedicated to training young songwriters.

Their debut album, Out of Our Heads, featuring an all-star lineup of Broadway performers, is now available on iTunes.

Website >>

Bio as of April, 2014.

Mark Allen has been a published songwriter and musician since he was ten years old. Before moving to New York, Mark was a studio vocalist and songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, working with some of the biggest names in country and gospel music. An award-winning and critically acclaimed professional actor and director, Mark has been a part of theatre virtually his whole life. Mark is also a 2006 graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, where he was the winner of the 2005 ASCAP Max Dreyfus Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre Writing. Mark is also an award-winning film composer, winning the Award for Best Original Score at the 2008 First Take Film Festival for his original score for the award-winning feature film, A Viking Saga. He and his beautiful wife Kelly, an actor and performer, live in New York.

Bio as of February, 2009.

Dave Malloy is a composer/performer/sound designer/musical director/pianist. He is the winner of an OBIE award, the 2009 Jonathan Larson Grant and a recipient of the 2009 NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Theatre Directors and Designers. Recent works include Three Pianos, a drunken romp through Schubert's Winterreise co-created with Rick Burkhardt and Alec Duffy, which received a Special Citation OBIE award and will remount at New York Theatre Workshop in December 2010. He is the composer of Beowulf - A Thousand Years of Baggage, Banana Bag & Bodice SongPlay commissioned by Berkeley Shotgun Players that has enjoyed sold out runs at several venues in NYC, Berkeley, Boston and Montreal, received the 2008 Glickman Award and appeared on The New Yorker Best of 2009 list and the Best of 2008 lists of every major Bay Area paper (including two #1 spots).Beowulf is Mr. Malloy's sixth collaboration with BB&B, a Brooklyn based collaborative ensemble that has won numerous Fringe awards, 4 IT Awards nominations and two Time Out New York Best of lists. Mr. Malloy has written five full length musicals, including Clown Bible, a gypsy-jazz infused telling of biblical stories from Genesis to Revelation told through clowns ("Best Play of the Year" and "Best Music of the Year", East Bay Express 2007), and Banana Bag & Bodice Sandwich, a Weillian mishmash about eating animals. Other notable shows include Ten Red Hen (The 99-cent) Miss Saigon, a shoe-string adaptation complete with a toy helicopter on a zip line, for which Mr. Malloy was musical director, pianist and Chris.

Bio as of November, 2010.

Thomas Mizer is an acclaimed lyricist/librettist and recipient of a Jonathan Larson Grant for his music theater collaborations with Curtis Moore. His work has been seen on theatrical stages around the country, including the Williamstown Theater Festival, TheatreWorks Palo Alto, the Eugene O’Neill Center, and the NAMT Festival of New Musicals. An honors graduate of Northwestern University with degrees in Theater and English Literature, he has also completed the BMI Lehman Engel writing workshop and received an artist in residence grant from the National Music Theater Conference and ASCAP. In a “prior” life as an actor, Thomas appeared in roles Off-Broadway and at regional theaters. He last starred as “Steve” in the First National Tour of Blue’s Clues, Live!, including two sold-out weeks at Radio City Music Hall.

In addition to his work in the theater, Thomas is an award-winning advertising copywriter for major media brands such as Comedy Central and Food Network. He has written travel features for national publications including Passport Magazine and is the founding editor of The Broadway Blog, a website devoted to theater in New York and beyond.

Bio as of April, 2014.

CURTIS MOORE is a composer, songwriter and musician whose work can be heard on the Broadway and international stage, T.V., film, and new media. His work has been performed at Playwrights Horizons, The Old Vic Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Public Theater, and Lincoln Center.

Curtis recently composed the music for Nora Ephon's play Lucky Guy starring Tom Hanks. In collaboration with Thomas Mizer, lyricist, he was awarded the 2009 Jonathan Larson Grant. Together they have written the musicals Triangle (commissioned by Williamstown Theatre Festival, subsequently presented at the Eugene O’Neill Center, Theatreworks Palo Alto, and the Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma), The Legend Of Stagecoach Mary (National Alliance for Musical Theater), and The Bus To Buenos Aires (Ensemble Studio Theater, NY). Together, they teamed up with Amanda Green (Bring It On) and Matthew Brookshire on the critically acclaimed musical, For The Love Of Tiffany. Curtis also composed the score for Barry Edelstein's production of Timon of Athens at the Public Theater.

For film, Curtis and Matthew Brookshire wrote and performed songs for the Todd Solondz’ film Palindromes (Venice, Toronto, Telluride, New York film festivals.) Three of which were short-listed by Variety for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Original Song. Other film credits include composing the score for Clear Blue Tuesday, music for Industrial Light and Magic, MTV networks, production and orchestrations for Disney’s Pocahontas II, the Miss America Pageant, and the CBS’ Rose Bowl Celebration. Most recently, Curtis composed the music for the short film Places I Can Never Go Back To.

As a producer and songwriter, Curtis continues to develop and collaborate with artists around the world. Manager Dave Lory, taken with Curtis’ song “Season For Saying Goodbye”, solicited material for his diverse roster of clients including Irish tenor Ronan Tynan and opera singer Shawna Stone. The latter of which Curtis subsequently developed and helped secure a recording contract with EMI/Angel Records. His song “Seattle” appeared on the album “Entity” from #1 Billboard dance artist, Kevin Aviance, receiving high praise from the music press. Other artists he has worked with include Wafah Dafour, Ari Gold, Sara Ramirez, and two American Idol finalists - *Dilia and Karen Rodriguez.

He recently returned from conducting and performing the music in The Bridge Project’s acclaimed world tour of Richard III, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Kevin Spacey. This concluded three years of work with The Bridge Project (a joint production of BAM and The Old Vic) as Mark Bennett’s associate composer and music supervisor for The Cherry Orchard, The Winter’s Tale, As You Like It, The Tempest, and Richard III. As orchestrator, he has also worked with Mark Bennett on The Coast of Utopia, as associate composer and orchestrator with Mel Marvin on Cymbeline, and as music director for Moisés Kaufman’s production of Into The Woods. Curtis has provided orchestrations for Striking 12, The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, Saved, and the London revival of Pippin.

His new stage musical Venice, written with Matt Sax and Eric Rosen, premiered as a joint production between The Center Theater Group in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Rep, and was presented in a sold out-extended run at the Public Theater in New York in 2013.

Awards include “Best Composer Award” at the ASCAP/NYU Film Scoring Workshop, “Garland Award” for best score for a musical, and multiple grants from the Eugene O’Neill Music Theater Conference. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and a founding member of the Northwestern University Entertainment Alliance.

Curtis is currently based in New York, NY and enjoys volunteering his time and talent to The Actors Fund, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, and the Ali Forney Center.

Bio as of April, 2014.

Ryan Scott Oliver is a 2011 Lucille Lortel Award Nominee, a 2009 Jonathan Larson Grant recipient and wrote the music and lyrics for 35mm: A Musical Exhibition, Mrs. Sharp (2008 Richard Rodgers Award Winner, at Playwrights Horizons starring Jane Krakowski, dir. by Michael Greif), Darling(featured on the “Bound for Broadway” episode of NBC’s The Apprentice), the song cycle Out of My Head, Quit India (commissioned by UCLA), the music for Angus Oblong’s The Debbies, a commission for Disney Theatricals, The Frog Prince Continued (commissioned by Chicago’s Emerald City Theatre) and Jasper in Deadland (commissioned by the Pasadena Musical Theatre Program).

A collection of his work, Rated RSO, has been seen across the country, playing the Kennedy Center, Joe’s Pub, New York Musical Theatre Festival, and Pace University among others, and his work has also been heard at the Writer’s Guild Awards (perf. Kristen Schaal), Off-Broadway in TheatreWorksUSA’s We the People (Summer 2010 at the Lucille Lortel), on the hit YouTube TV show The Battery’s Down (“This is Your Life” among others) and in showcases presented by Weston Playhouse, Summer Play Festival (SPF), The York Theatre, Goodspeed Musicals, William Finn & Barrington Stages, New York Theatre Barn, Monday Nights New Voices, the Festival of New American Musicals in Los Angeles, Oklahoma City University (STRIPPED), Seattle’s New Voices, and more.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Gaby Alter wrote music and lyrics for Nobody Loves You with book writer/co-lyricist Itamar Moses, which premiered Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theater. Other musicals include Band Geeks, produced by Goodspeed Musicals and licensed through Music Theatre International; contributions to the review Stars of David (DR2 Theater, Daryl Roth Productions); and 29 (with Tommy Newman). Gaby is a recipient of a Jonathan Larson grant, both the San Francisco and San Diego Theater Critics’ Circle Awards, and an ASCAP Plus Award. He wrote the song "The Frigate That Flies" with Itamar for the Disney feature film Tinkerbell and the Pirate Fairy, songs for PBS TV, and soundtracks for film, radio and video games. He is a member of ASCAP and an alum of Tisch’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

Bio as of April 2018.

Susan Dilallo is a Kleban Award winner who wrote book/lyrics for the Richard Rodgers Award winning Once Upon A time In New Jersey, as well as book for Iron Curtain, Pinocchio, a Family Musical About Adoption, Hear Our Song and Outer Critics Circle nominee That's Life, and both book and lyrics for the Clear Channel/Mattel production of Barbie Live! In Fairytopia. Currently Susan is working on the libretto for the Broadway-bound A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.

Bio as of September, 2008.

As a songwriting team, Jeff Thomson and Jordan Mann received a 2008 Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Grant. They were 2006-2007 Musical Theatre Writing Fellows with the Dramatist Guild, and were mentored by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty, Richard Maltby, and David Shire. They co-wrote the 2005 Disney/ASCAP Selection The New Kid and participated in the first ever Perry Mansfield Composer Stage Project with Craig Carnelia. Their songs have heard at the Duplex, and they have been featured songwriters in the acclaimed Monday Night New Voices programs in Chicago and New York, Fight On!!! and Facing The Facts at the Laurie Beechman Theatre. Their song "When The Words Wont Come" was published in the Fall 2007 issue of The Dramatist.

Bio as of September, 2008.

Joel B. New is an award-winning composer/lyricist. He is the proud recipient of a 2008 American Theatre Wing Jonathan Larson Grant. Joel has been praised as one of today’s “most exciting contemporary musical theatre writers.” (BroadwayWorld.com)

His stage projects include To Hell and Back, Mackenzie and the Missing Boy, Awakening (music: J. Oconer Navarro, book: Jennifer Stafford), Standalone, In Others’ Words, and RSVP.

Joel’s work has been seen and developed at Ars Nova, New York Theatre Barn, Lincoln Center, and more, performed by the likes of Broadway veterans Mary Testa, Donna Lynne Champlin, and Megan McGinnis. In addition to the Larson Award, his honors include receiving an NYU-Tisch Alumni Grant (made possible by the Frederick Loewe Foundation), a Margo Lion Award, and a Blevins-Thrower Encouragement Award.

Joel holds an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and is a member of BMI and the Dramatists Guild of America. He is currently represented by Abrams Artists Agency.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Jason Rhyne a recipient of a 2008 Jonathan Larson Grant as a composer-lyricist, Jason is a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts and studied musical theatre at Ithaca College. His credits include lyrics for a new musical adaptation of the HBO film Rocket Science (music by Stephen Weiner, book by Patricia Cotter), which received the 2010 Richard Rodgers Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; music and lyrics for the The MacGuffin, presented at the New York Musical Theatre Festival; and book, music and lyrics for an adaptation of the children's novel Littlejim. Jason is an alumnus of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop.

Bio as of March, 2010.

for An Infinite Ache by Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda

Brendan Milburn used to tour around the country all the time in a van with his band GrooveLily; now he stays home a lot more and writes musicals, produces other people's records, and changes his new son's diaper a lot. Current Projects: Striking 12: The Groovelilly Holiday Show (with Valerie Vigoda and Rachel Sheinkin), Sleeping Beauty (with Vigoda and Sheinkin, commissioned by Deaf West), a chamber musical commissioned by the Pittsburgh City Theater, Watt?!? (with the multiple Emmy-award-winning David Javerbaum), Wheelhouse (with GrooveLily and Ms. Sheinkin).

Bio as of September, 2008.

Valerie Vigoda, electric violinist/singer/songwriter, grew up in McLean, Virginia. She has toured the world with with Cyndi Lauper (opening for Tina Turner and Cher), Joe Jackson and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. An honors graduate of Princeton and former Army lieutenant, Valerie founded the band GrooveLily in 1994, and spent years touring on the indie circuit. Now she is delighted to be spending less time in the band van, and more time creating projects with her collaborators: Striking 12, the first GrooveLily concert-musical (Off-Broadway 2006, Lucille Lortel Nomination for Outstanding Musical, Bay Area Theatre Critic's Choice Award); Toy Story The Musical for Disney; Sleeping Beauty Wakes for Deaf West Theatre/Center Theatre Group (Two 2007 Ovation Awards, including World Premiere Musical; Valerie was also nominated for Lead Actress); Wheelhouse, the second GrooveLily concert-musical; Long Story Short for City Theatre of Pittsburgh/TheatreWorks Palo Alto; Midsummer Night's Dream for McCarter Theatre/Paper Mill Playhouse; and Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, a new 1-woman fever-dream musical.

Bio as of September, 2008.

Matt Gould is the recipient of ASCAP’s Dean Kay Award and Harold Adamson Award and has received a Disney/ASCAP workshop with Stephen Schwartz and a workshop at the Vineyard Arts Project/Art Farm.  Matt is also working on a commission for Yale Reperatory Theatre with playwright Carson Kreitzer on a new musical called Lempicka.  He wrote and directed Free Style for LA’s Reprise Theatre Company (commissioned by Jason Alexander), wrote Twilight in Manchego  (Jonathan Larson Foundation Award) in the NYMF, was commissioned by Playwrights Horizons to write music for Lucy Thurber’s Dillingham City, composed music for Dreyfus In Rehearsal (Theatre Row) and translated, adapted and directed Romeo and Juliet in Pulaar(Mauritania, West Africa.) He was a composing fellow in New Dramatist’s Composer-Librettist studio and has composed and arranged music for Grammy winners Desmond Child, Terrence McNally, Vanessa Williams, and more.  His music has been performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Saban Theatre (LA), Symphony Space (NYC), Joe’s Pub, New World Stages, Huntington Theatre Company (Boston), Rattlestick (NYC), Summit Series, and with Griffin Matthews this March, TEDx Wall Street!

Bio as of April, 2014.

Melissa Li is a composer, lyricist, and performer. She is a Jonathan Larson Award winner, whose most recent musical 99% Stone (The Theater Offensive), about the 1969 Stonewall riots, received an NPN Creation Fund and a NEFA Grant. Her first musical, Surviving the Nian (The Theater Offensive), won an IRNE award for Best New Play in 2007. She is currently writing her third full-length musical Interstate with poet Kit Yan and director Jessi D. Hill.

Melissa has released music both as a solo artist and collaboratively. First, she released her solo album 2 Seconds Away in 2008, then as part of rock-poetry band Good Asian Drivers, she released Drive Away Home in 2009. After forming her own pop/rock outfit Melissa Li & The Barely Theirs, the band released The Beginning in 2011.

She is proud to be from Boston, and proud to live in Brooklyn.

Bio as of April, 2014

Robert Maddock learned his MFA at NYU's Tisch Graduate Musical Theatre Writing program and his BA in English from BYU Hawaii. Maddock is a recipient of a 2006 Daryl Roth Award for his musical Plastic!? - a nerd-rock spectacular about a one-armed kleptomaniac and a buxom superstar (words by Maddock, music by Joe Iconis and Reza Jacobs). Plastic! was featured in the 2006 NAMT songwriter's showcase at New World Stages and the 2006 Bound-for-Broadway concert series at Merkin Hall. Other projects include Triumphant Baby, a concert of songs by Maddock & Iconis, performed by Lorinda Lisitza, and Women on Fire, an unstable song-cycle that celebrates ladies, diet pills, and firearms (by Maddock & Iconis). Additionally, Maddock is working with Iconis as the co-author of The Black Suits, a fierce new musical in development with the MCC. Aside from his theatre ventures, Maddock has written a novel, Clouds of Benjamin, busies himself as an aspiring illustrator, and is inspired by limericks, vintage comics, Sidney Lumet movies, Ouija Boards and The Muppets.

Bio as of September, 2008.

J. Oconer Navarro is an award-winning writer, musical director, arranger, pianist, and vocal coach based in NYC.
Awards and recognition for his works:  2014 commission from The Music Theatre Company (Chicago), 2011 National Asian Artists Project “Discover: New Musicals” Series Selection, 2009 Musical Theatre Society of Emerson College New Works Festival Winner, 2008 NYU-Tisch Alumni Grant made possible by the Frederick Loewe Foundation, 2007 American Theatre Wing Jonathan Larson Grant, 2006 Margo Lion Award, & 2005 Paulette Goddard Award.

J. was Music Director on the acclaimed Adding Machine (dir. David Cromer), which garnered Lortel, Obie, and Outer Critics Circle Awards, and whose Cast Album is available from PS Classics.  He collaborated with composer Josh Schmidt again on Whida Peru: Resurrection Tangle at Premieres/Primary Stages (dir. Jonathan Butterell).  He was MD and Arranger for three National Tours for Theatreworks USA, including the Lortel-nominated We the People (dir. Gordon Greenberg); for his work on This One Girl’s Story (NYMF 2011), J. received an Honorable Mention for his orchestrations.  J. specializes in new work, and has headed numerous concerts, readings, and workshops at venues all over NYC, including CAP21, various festivals, and the prestigious Lincoln Center Theater.

Regionally, he was MD and Arranger for Quiara Alegría Hudes’ and Bill Sherman’s Barrio Grrrl! at The Kennedy Center (Helen Hayes Nomination), and has worked at esteemed houses including Barrington Stage Company, Hangar Theatre, Theatreworks – Palo Alto, Two River Theater Company, & Westport Country Playhouse.

J. also has worked extensively in the Music Department of about a dozen Broadway/Off-Broadway shows; some favorites include Avenue Q, Next to Normal, The 25th … Spelling Bee, assisting the legendary John Kander for Curtains (starring David Hyde Pierce), and piano coaching Hollywood superstar Ben Stiller in the recent revival of The House of Blue Leaves.

J. is on faculty at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts – Department of Undergraduate Drama, New Studio on Broadway under the Direction of Kent Gash.  He is a proud member of ASCAP, Local 802 AFM, and The Dramatists Guild of America.  J. has also been a Guest Artist at CAP21, Columbia University, the Juilliard School, Pace University, the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He hails from the suburbs of Detroit, MI, where he trained in classical piano at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor before attending Vanderbilt University (BS in Human and Organizational Development w/ a conc. in Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness, BS in Music w/ a conc. in Piano Performance) and earning his MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU.

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Bio as of April, 2014

Tony-nominated songwriters of the Broadway musical A Christmas Story (dir. John Rando, chor. Warren Carlyle), which opened in November 2012 and enjoyed a critically-acclaimed, record-breaking run at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. In addition to the Best Score nomination, A Christmas Story also received Tony nominations for Best Musical and Best Book. The holiday musical was named one of the Top 10 Shows of 2012 by Time Magazine, shared recognition as the #1 Musical of 2012 in USA Today and received Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Outstanding New Broadway Musical. Benj and Justin’s score for the show also received a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Music. The cast album was recorded and produced by Sony Masterworks and is published through Warner/Chappell Music.

Benj & Justin are also the composers behind the Off-Broadway musical Dogfight, (dir. Joe Mantello, chor. Christopher Gattelli), a Best New Musical nominee for the Drama League, Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle awards. Benj and Justin also received an Outer Critics Circle Best Score nomination for their work on the show. Dogfight premiered in July 2012 at Second Stage Theatre, and a cast album, produced by Sh-K-Boom/Ghostlight Records, was released in May 2013. The album debuted in the top 50 albums on iTunes.

As television songwriters, their original songs were featured on Season 2 of NBC’s Smash, and have risen to the Top 25 on the iTunes Pop Charts.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Mike Pettry is a New York based composer/lyricist and musician. He is a 2012 ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Lyric Award winner and a 2007 Jonathan Larson Award winner. Musicals written include Hardcore West Virginia (2012 ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop), The Time Travelers Convention (album with Phoebe Strole and Nick Blaemire available on iTunes), World of Heroes, The Wonderful World of Zidney (commissioned, featured highlight at Kennedy Center Page to Stage Festival), and Flipside (2007 NYU Frederick Loewe Award winner). Muzz Skillings (of Living Colour) produced several of Mike's songs for the Lin McEwan album "When I Wake..." Mike's solo album "The Voices In My Head" is available on iTunes. He also wrote and produced music for the film The Promise of New York (Big Muddy Film Festival Audience Choice Best Documentary).

As a musician, Mike frequently subbed on the Broadway revival of Godspell. He toured the country with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2007-2008) as assistant conductor, and appeared off-Broadway in Signs Of Life (music director) and Rooms: A Rock Romance (Time Life cast album). He orchestrated and music directed the world premiere of Fly By Night at Theatreworks in Palo Alto, CA. Other NYC performances include The Black Suits (Public Theater) and Things To Ruin: The Songs of Joe Iconis (Second Stage, Sh-K-Boom cast album). Mike is a songwriting teaching artist with Lincoln Center Theater. BA in piano and composition from Shepherd University, MFA in musical theatre writing from NYU/Tisch.

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Bio as of November, 2012.

for Must Don't Whip 'Um by Cynthia Hopkins

Cynthia Hopkins is the recipient of the 2007 Alpert Award in Theater, honoring her work as a writer, composer, performer, multi-instrumentalist, and theater artist. Her mission is to investigate new forms of theatrical communication which provoke emotion, stimulate the senses, and enliven the mind; obscuring the distinction between edification and entertainment through the creation of works which are as philosophical as they are entertaining, as intellectually challenging as they are viscerally emotional, as deeply comical as they are tragic, and as historically aware as they are immediately engaging. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the ensemble company Accinosco (www.accinosco.com) with whom she has created four full length multi-media performance works - Accidental Nostalgia (2005 Bessie Award for Creation), Must Don't Whip 'Um (2007 Bessie Award for Design), The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success) (conceived as Parts I, II, and III of The Accidental Trilogy); and The Truth: A Tragedy. These works feature the band Gloria Deluxe (www.gloriadeluxe.com), which Ms. Hopkins formed in 1999 and which has since produced eight full-length albums and performed at numerous venues in New York City and elsewhere. Accinosco's critically acclaimed works have been celebrated by multiple Bessie Awards, and have been supported by a host of institutional partners (foundations and presenters) including the Jerome Foundation, the MAP Fund, NYSCA, the Greenwall Foundation, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, APAP's Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Grant Program, the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation, the Philadelphia Performing Arts Festival, PICA's Time Based Art Festival, REDCAT, MASS MoCA, On the Boards, the Walker Art Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and St. Ann's Warehouse. Ms. Hopkins is currently at work on the creation of This Clement World, a new piece addressing the climate crisis. She is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow.

Bio as of November, 2010.

Andrew Gerle is the son of classical recording artists Marilyn Neeley and Robert Gerle, Andrew started his musical career as a classical pianist in the Baltimore area, appearing with local orchestras and on National Public Radio and Television. While attending Yale University, he won the Yale Symphony’s concerto competition and the National Symphony Orchestra’s Young Artists’ Competition, and appeared as guest soloist with both orchestras. During this time, he was also invited to participate in a private competition for Maestro Mstislav Rostropovich at the Kennedy Center.

After graduating magna cum laude from Yale, he moved to New York and began work as a musical director and accompanist. Over the past 15 years, he has worked with such distinguished artists as Kitty Carlisle Hart, John Raitt, Leslie Uggams, Jennifer Holliday, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Michael Rupert, and Liz Callaway. He was selected by the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization to create a complete re-orchestration of South Pacfic for a major regional production, and has worked on projects for composers including John Kander, Ricky Ian Gordon, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie.

As a musical theater writer, Andrew won a 2011 Richard Rodgers Award and the 2012 Kleban Award for outstanding librettist for his musical Gloryana. He also won three other Rodgers Awards (administered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters) for The Tutor (book and lyrics by Maryrose Wood). He won a 2006 Jonathan Larson Award for Meet John Doe (lyrics by Eddie Sugarman), which had its world premiere production at the Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 2007 and was nominated for seven Helen Hayes Awards. He was also the first recipient of the Burton Lane Fellowship for Young Composers, awarded by the Theater Hall of Fame. His songs have been performed on Public Radio International, at Symphony Space, the Public Theater and the Lincoln Center Songbook series in New York, and on VH1’s Save the Music benefit. This September, he will have an evening of his work at the Kennedy Center as part of ASCAP’s “Songwriters: the Next Generation” series.

An accomplished orchestrator and arranger, Andrew’s symphonic orchestrations of Broadway standards have been performed by the Boston Pops and over a dozen other US symphony orchestras. He created an evening of new arrangements and orchestrations for the Baltimore Symphonyʼs Gershwin Centennial celebration, in which he also appeared as piano soloist. His work as a musical director has taken him from off-Broadway houses to regional theaters, from Texas to Cape Cod, and from Russia to Taiwan. At 26, he was one of the youngest conductors ever to conduct a major international orchestra when he led the Seoul Philharmonic Symphonic in a series of sold-out concerts at the 3,000-seat Sejong Cultural Center. He has been a writer in residence at the Eugene O’Neill National Musical Theater Conference, and a Fellow at the MacDowell Artists’ Colony in New Hampshire and the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.

Composer-lyricist Lance Horne has performed alongside, composed, and/or provided arrangements for Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth, Ricki Lake, Cheyenne Jackson, Kelli O’Hara, Jake Shears, Meow Meow, Justin Bond, Sandra Bernhard, Amanda Palmer/Dresden Dolls, and Boston Pops; appeared with Seoul Philharmonic, Atlanta Symphony, London Gay Men’s Chorus, Sydney Dance Company, on Sirius Radio and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; opened for Death Cab, Michael Feinstein, Dwight Yoakam; performed for President Obama, the First Lady, and Queen Elizabeth; conducted return engagements at Sydney Opera House, international tours of Handel’s Messiah Rocks and Jekyll & Hyde, West End appearances at the Vaudeville, Hippodrome, Garrick, and Apollo, multiple performances at Carnegie and Zankel Hall; participated in Pina Bausch’s final Tanzfestival, Baryshnikov’s Ringling Festival, David Bowie’s Highline Festival, Toronto’s Luminato festival, two seasons at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook and the Geffen; at ART, co-MDed/co-arranged Prometheus Bound by Steven Sater/Serj Tankian (System of a Down) and Cabaret starring Amanda Palmer; contributed original material and arrangements to Vegas! The Show currently playing at Planet Hollywood Casino in Las Vegas, MDed the Sater/Sheik Alice by Heart for the National Theater in London, and provided the vocal arrangements for the Broadway production of Little Women.  His debut album First Things Last released on Yellow Sound Label (ADA/Warner) with concurrent concerts at Lincoln Center and on the West End.

MR. HORNE received an Emmy for Best Original Song (Daytime: One Life to Live), the Jonathan Larson Award for composer-lyricist, a Bistro Award for producing Alan Cumming’s album, I Bought a Blue Car Today, ASCAP Young Composer Awards, the ASCAP Foundation Jamie DeRoy Award for Emerging Songwriter, Interlochen Ovation Award, and is a Usual Suspect at NYTW.  Composition residencies at the Orchard Project, New Harmony Project, American Opera Projects, TheaterWorks Palo Alto, ACT, Franklin Furnace, ArsNova, Public Theater, and the O'Neill NMTC,.  Macy’s received an Emmy for “Yes, Virginia”, which Mr. Horne arranged and produced for their Thanksgiving Parade telecast.  On NBC: 80th, 82nd, 83rd, 84th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parades with Diana DeGarmo, Phoenix Boys Choir, Clique Girls, Alan Cumming, Ann Hampton Callaway, and NBC Orchestra. On ABC: Lincoln Center Tree Lighting with Sesame Street, One Life to Live: Prom Night- The Musical.  Scores and songs for film: Ready? OK! starring Carrie Preston (True Blood) and Michael Emerson (Lost), To Paint the Portrait of a Bird, Thank You For Judging, and Yes, Virginia.  Recordings: Little Women (Ghostlight), Yes, Virginia, Songs From An Unmade Bed (Ghostlight), A Season’s Promise (New World Records), The Battery’s Down Season 2 (Sh-K-Boom), Julie Atherton’s No Space for Air (Speckulation), One Life to Live: Prom Night- the Musical (ABC), and the aforementioned Alan Cumming: I Bought a Blue Car Today (Yellow Sound Label) with additional singles with Cumming and remixes by DJ Morel.

HORNE actively supports amFAR, BC/EFA, Actor’s Fund, GLAAD, Sing for Hope, New York Hearing Institute, LiveOutLoud, Point Foundation, True Colors Foundation, Survivors UK and ASTEP through appearances and creation of original material.  He holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Music Composition from The Juilliard School, currently completing his DMA at CUNY Graduate Center, has taught at Juilliard for a decade in the College, Evening, Precollege, and mentoring divisions, NYU, in Paris at EAMA, has guest-lectured in communications at Stockholm HyperIsland and in theater and composition at his alma mater, Interlochen Arts Academy.  He is a proud member of the Players.

Musicals in development include The $trip and Amandine, contributing material to The Etiquette of Death at LaMama, a marionette show for Macy’s and a live event for Sydney Mardi Gras.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Joe Iconis is a writer and performer.  He is a creature of Manhattan and can frequently be spotted banging away on a dirty old piano. His songs are featured on Season 2 of NBC’s Smash. As a composer – lyricist – bookwriter he has authored the musicals  Bloodsong of Love, The Black Suits (with Robert Maddock), ReWrite, The Plant That Ate Dirty Socks and We The People. His concert act, Joe Iconis and Family, frequently plays The Beechman Theater, 54 Below, and Joe’s Pub.  The original cast recording of Joe’s theatrical rock concert Things To Ruin, is out on Sh-K-Boom/Ghostlight records. He’s been nominated for two Drama Desk Awards, a Lucille Lortel Award, and is the recipient of an Ed Kleban Award, a Jonathan Larson Award, and several other fancy-sounding writing awards. Joe is deliriously inspired by Robert Altman, Dolly Parton, Martin Scorcese, Sardi’s, The Rolling Stones, whiskey, The Muppets, and The Family of artists he frequently surrounds himself with.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Kait Kerrigan (words) and Brian Lowdermilk (music) made their off-Broadway debut in 2006 with their adaptation of Henry and Mudge, still touring nationally. In 2011, they released their first album Our First Mistake, which charted at #1 on the iTunes Singer/Songwriter chart. Their new album, Kerrigan-Lowdermilk Live, documents a concert tour that resulted from their breakout $35K kickstarter campaign and released this spring. Other musicals include The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown, Tales from the Bad Years, The Woman Upstairs, Wrong Number, The Freshman Experiment, Republic and Flash of Time. Their songs have been recorded and performed internationally and their musicals have been developed at the Goodspeed’s Norma Terris Theatre, Theatreworks Silicon Valley, La Jolla Playhouse, Perry-Mansfield New Works Festival, ASCAP/Disney Workshop, Manhattan Theatre Club, York Theatre, the Lark Playwrights Development Center, and Primary Stages. Together, they received the 2006 Larson Award and 2004-2005 Dramatists Guild Fellowship, and they have held residencies at the Orchard Project and the MacDowell Arts Colony.

Kerrigan received the 2009 Kleban Award for libretto-writing. As a playwright, she has written Disaster Relief (developed by Page 73), Imaginary Love (Hapgood Theatre 2011), Transit (Lark Playwrights Week 2010) and she is a member of Interstate 73. She teaches libretto writing at Primary Stages.

Lowdermilk composed music for The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful and Her Dog (with playwright Lauren Gunderson at the Kennedy Center 2011) and Red (with librettist Marcus Stevens), which received the Alan Menken Award and 2005 Richard Rodgers Award. He was the writer-in-residence at Temple Shalom, during which he scored a full Shabbat service.

Both are alumni of the BMI Musical Theatre Writing Workshop, co-founders of the digital sheet music company NewMusicalTheatre.com, and proud members of the Dramatists Guild and ASCAP.

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Bio as of April, 2014

Alison Loeb received the Jonathan Larson Grant in 2006. She’s a veteran of the BMI Lehman Engel songwriting workshop, an alumna of the O’Neill Cabaret workshop, and a member of ASCAP.  Her MendelsSongs (a song cycle) and script and lyrics for Mendelssohn on the Hudson (podcast produced by Inwood Art Works), feature her oral histories of the German Jews of Washington Heights, set to Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words. Alison and her husband, actor Sam Guncler, create video shorts—animated and live—based on her songs and stories. Their videos have won awards at film festivals across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Bio as of July 2022.

Brendan Milburn used to tour around the country all the time in a van with his band GrooveLily; now he stays home a lot more and writes musicals, produces other people's records, and changes his new son's diaper a lot. Current Projects: Striking 12: The Groovelilly Holiday Show (with Valerie Vigoda and Rachel Sheinkin), Sleeping Beauty (with Vigoda and Sheinkin, commissioned by Deaf West), a chamber musical commissioned by the Pittsburgh City Theater, Watt?!? (with the multiple Emmy-award-winning David Javerbaum), Wheelhouse (with GrooveLily and Ms. Sheinkin).

Bio as of September, 2008.

Valerie Vigoda, electric violinist/singer/songwriter, grew up in McLean, Virginia. She has toured the world with with Cyndi Lauper (opening for Tina Turner and Cher), Joe Jackson and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. An honors graduate of Princeton and former Army lieutenant, Valerie founded the band GrooveLily in 1994, and spent years touring on the indie circuit. Now she is delighted to be spending less time in the band van, and more time creating projects with her collaborators: Striking 12, the first GrooveLily concert-musical (Off-Broadway 2006, Lucille Lortel Nomination for Outstanding Musical, Bay Area Theatre Critic's Choice Award); Toy Story The Musical for Disney; Sleeping Beauty Wakes for Deaf West Theatre/Center Theatre Group (Two 2007 Ovation Awards, including World Premiere Musical; Valerie was also nominated for Lead Actress); Wheelhouse, the second GrooveLily concert-musical; Long Story Short for City Theatre of Pittsburgh/TheatreWorks Palo Alto; Midsummer Night's Dream for McCarter Theatre/Paper Mill Playhouse; and Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, a new 1-woman fever-dream musical.

Bio as of September, 2008.

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for Passing Strange by Mark Stewart and Heidi Rodewald

Stew (Mark Stewart) Book, Lyrics, Co-Composer, Co-Orchestrator, Narrator for Passing Strange is the critically acclaimed singer, songwriter, founder and leader of The Negro Problem, a pop-rock combo from Los Angeles. Works: Post Minstrel Syndrome (1997), Joys & Concerns (1999), Welcome Black (2002). Along with Heidi Rodewald he co-founded the Afro-Baroque cabaret ensemble known as STEW. Works: Guest Host (2000), The Naked Dutch Painter (2002), Something Deeper Than These Changes (2003). Artist-in-residence at the California Institute of the Arts (2004/5); Sundance Theatre Lab (2004/5); Sundance Screenwriters' Lab (2005); Sundance Directors' Lab (2005); Passing Strange, Berkeley Rep/Public Theater (2006/7). Composed "Gary Come Home" for the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon.

Bio as of April, 2008.

Heidi Rodewald, Co-Composer, Co-Orchestrator, Bass, Vocals, for Passing Strange has spent more than a decade as a performer, arranger, producer and composer for both The Negro Problem and the multi-disciplinary ensemble known as STEW. Credits include Passing Strange, Berkeley Repertory Theater/The Public Theater (2006/2007); Karen Kandel's Portraits: Night and Day (2004); co-writer with Stew of the screenplay We Can See Today, Sundance Screenwriters'/Directors' Lab (2005) wrote and performed with the seminal female punk band Wednesday Week.

Bio as of April, 2008.

Neil Bartram is the composer and lyricist of Broadway’s The Story of My Life with book writer Brian Hill (four Drama Desk Award nominations including two for Neil - Outstanding Music and Outstanding Lyrics). Their adaptation of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio was commissioned by Chicago Shakespeare Theater for their 2011 season. Neil and Brian’s musical Not Wanted On The Voyage received a developmental production at Northwestern University’s Barber Theatre as part of the American Music Theatre Project, and was part of Goodspeed Musicals’ 2012 New Works Festival. Current projects include The Theory of Relativity commissioned by Sheridan College, Spin for Seoul Korea’s OD Musical Company directed by Eric Schaeffer (Signature Theatre, Arlington, VA Summer of 2013 followed by Seoul) and a musical based on Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Neil’s awards include a Jonathan Larson Foundation Award, a Dramatists Guild Fellowship, and a Dora Award. Cast albums include Somewhere in the World and The Story of My Life (PS Classics). Neil is a member of the Dramatists Guild, ASCAP, and is an alumnus of the BMI Lehman Engel Music Theatre Workshop.

Bio as of April, 2014

Nathan Christensen received his BA in theatre studies from Brigham Young University in 2002. He earned his MFA from New York University's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program in 2004, where he wrote Broadcast with Scott Murphy. His previous work includes Here In The Heartland (a Brechtian musical about the realities of small town life in America), Small Courage (an impressionistic portrait of Sir James Barrie, author of Peter Pan), The Battle Of Creek Cure (a dark comedy dealing with the bizarre health fads at the turn of the last century), and Cambices, King Of Persia (a verse adaptation of an Elizabethan play, integrating puppetry and live actors). He was the recipient of the Dramatists Guild's 2004 Jonathan Larson Musical Theatre Fellowship, and the 2005 Daryl Roth Award.

Bio as of September, 2008.

Scott Murphy received his BA in music composition in 2002 from Bennington College, where he studied with Ricky Ian Gordon. He earned his MFA in musical theatre writing from New York University in 2004. His work includes Shark In The Creek (book, music, and lyrics), Broadcast (music), and Phoebe (music). His song, I Miss Him, can be heard on Tom Bogdin's CD For Your Delight: New American Art Songs, and his song, My Perfect World, was performed by Brian D'Arcy James at the 2003 Children's Aid Society benefit concert. Scott has held internships at Manhattan Theatre Club and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. He received the Dramatists Guild's 2004 Jonathan Larson Musical Theatre Fellowship, and the 2005 Daryl Roth Award.

Bio as of September, 2008.

Michael Cooper is a MAC Award Nominated songwriter, recipient of the 2005 Jonathan Larson, Daryl Roth, and TRU Daniel Marshall Multicultural Awards. BA in Theatre from Williams College; MFA from NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. His musical, "Sunfish," for which he co-wrote book and lyrics and produced, was awarded the top jury honor at the Daegu International Music Theatre Festival, South Korea in June 2013. "Sunfish" received its regional premiere at the Stoneham Theatre, MA (Broadwayworld Award Best Musical) and was showcased at the 2010 ASCAP Workshop with Stephen Schwartz, the 2006 NAMT Festival of New Musicals, TRU Reading Series, and was a finalist in the Alliance Theatre's Kendeda Playwriting Competition. "It Shoulda Been You" (Additional Lyrics), world premiere at the George Street Playhouse (directed by David Hyde Pierce and staring Tyne Daly) and Village Theatre Issaquah, WA; "Rites of Passage," "Museum Pieces," and "The Dome" (Prospect Theatre Company); "The Strange Affair of Dr. Crippen" (Theatrebuilding Chicago); "Lizardman!" (Audience Favorite, Short Attention Span Festival) and "Luna Park," commissioned by SUNY Cortland. Selected for the York Theatre's NEO5 Concert series and ASCAP Johnny Mercer Songwriting Project. Associate producer for "Zombie," an award-winning short film based on the novella by Joyce Carol Oates. Member of ASCAP, BMI Workshop, and the Dramatists Guild. Michael is the President of Three Hundred Bags of Rice, Inc., a theatrical production company.

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Bio as of December, 2013.

Hyeyoung Kim (Composer) is originally from Seoul, Korea, and received her BA in Music Composition from Ewha Woman's University and MFA from NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Recipient of the 2005 Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award, Daryl Roth Award, and TRU Daniel Marshall Multicultural Award. She is a member of the BMI workshop and participated in 2007 Nautilus composer/librettist lab at New Dramatists. Hyeyoung wrote the book and music for Sunfish, with Michael L. Cooper, which was showcased at the 2006 NAMT Festival and workshopped at Cortland in summer of 2007. And now, Luna Park. Hyeyoung also composed music for Museum Pieces (Prospect Theatre Company Dark Night's Series, 2008). Her new show, Caffeine, with Jeajoon Seong, will open at Theater Live in Korea, November 2008. Upcoming commission: Falling, with Dina Gregory.

Bio as of September, 2008.

Steven Lutvak has received, in addition to two Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation grants, a New American Works Grant from the NEA, the first Johnny Mercer Emerging American Songwriter Award, and with his principal collaborator, Robert L. Freedman, both the Kleban Award for Lyric Writing and the Fred Ebb Songwriting Award. He wrote the title track to the hit film, Mad Hot Ballroom. Up next is his new musical, written with Robert Freedman, A Gentleman's Guide To Love and Murder, which will open September '10 at the La Jolla Playhouse, starring Jefferson Mays, and directed by Darko Tresjnak. Other musicals include The Wayside Inn, Esmeralda, Almost September, and Campaign Of The Century, which was presented in a concert version in as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and in New York as part of the New York Musical Theater Festival, both starring Michael Rupert. He performs his songs across the country, and can be heard on his debut CD, The Time It Takes.

Bio as of February, 2010.

Glenn Slater began writing for the theatre at age seventeen, with the off-Broadway production How I Survived High School(1986) and a stint at Harvard's legendary Hasty Pudding Theatricals. Perhaps best-known for writing the lyrics for Disney's animated Western, Home On The Range, with composer Alan Menken (April, 2004), Glenn's recent work also includes the lyrics for the Manhattan Theatre Club's Obie-Award-winning revue newyorkers (2001 Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle nominations), as well as the lyrics for the six editions of the Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus. Upcoming projects include the Broadway adaptation of Disney's The Little Mermaid, as well as a musical based on the film Leap of Faith. With composer Stephen Weiner, his collaborator on newyorkers, he is currently penning a musical adaptation of the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy. Glenn is the recipient of the Kleban Award for Lyrics (1996), as well as the ASCAP/Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award (2000). He is an alumnus of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, and a member of both ASCAP and the Dramatists' Guild. Glenn lives in Manhattan with his wife, composer/ lyricist Wendy Wilf, and son Benjamin.

Bio as of September, 2008.

Stephen Weiner most recently wrote the score for Once Upon A Time In New Jersey (Book and Lyrics by Susan DiLallo), which captured both the 2003 Richard Rodgers Award and the 2003 Kleban Award for Ms. DiLallo's book, and which has been showcased at staged readings and workshops around the country. Off-Broadway credits include the Manhattan Theatre Club's Obie-Award winning newyorkers (Lyrics by Glenn Slater), which received the Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle nominations for Best Off Broadway Musical, and Hamlet Sings (lyrics by Peter Mills), produced at the Prospect Theater Company. Regional credits include the musical Spittin' Image, which premiered at the Forum Theater in New Jersey (Book by Karin Kasdin, Lyrics by Laura Szabo-Cohen). Awards include the 2000 ASCAP Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award, and the ASCAP Bernice Cohen Award for his unproduced score to Lost In America. Steve is currently working with lyricist Glenn Slater on The Hudsucker Proxy, which was recently workshopped at the New Voices Festival in Steamboat Springs, CO, as well as a new musical comedy, Iron Curtain, with Peter Mills (Book & Lyrics). He is a graduate of the ASCAP, BMI and Dramatists Guild Musical Theater Workshops, and an ASCAP member. He lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with his favorite cast - wife Ryta and daughters Marla, Lisa and Olivia.

Bio as of September, 2008.

for Barnstormer by Doug Cohen and Cheryl Davis

Doug Cohen received the 2010 Fred Ebb Award for Musical Theatre Songwriting and won two Richard Rodgers Awards for writing book, music, and lyrics for Now Way To Treat a Lady (produced twice off-Broadway resulting in productions worldwide) and The Gig (Manhattan Theatre Club Stage II, Goodspeed, York Theatre Company concert, Sacramento Music Circus). Doug is the composer/lyricist of The Big Time (book by Douglas Carter Beane) which debuted at the NYMF Festival. Nominated for a 2005 Drama Desk Award (Outstanding Lyrics, Children's Letters to God), he penned co-book, music, and lyrics for The Opposite of Sex (Williamstown Theatre Festival) and received a Jonathan Larson Grant for composing Barnstormer, which has recently been optioned by Lawrence Poster. His latest musical is Nine Wives with collaborator Dan Elish which recently received a reading in New York produced by Larry Hirschhorn and starring Heidi Blickenstaff and Sarah Stiles. His new play, Lovely Send Anywhere, received a reading in October 2012 starring Santino Fontana and Condola Rashad and helmed by Dan Knechtges. Doug recently joined the faculty of the Neighborhood Playhouse where he teaches the 2nd year students in song interpretation. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, ASCAP, and the Tony Nominating Committee.

Bio as of October, 2012.

Cheryl Davis is a co-recipient of the Kleban Award for her work as a librettist, and her musical Barnstormer, written with award-winning composer Douglas J. Cohen, received a Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award, under the auspices of the Lark Play Development Center. Her play about the desegregation of the nations’ school system, The Color of Justice, which was commissioned by Theatreworks/USA, received critical acclaim, including excellent reviews in the New York Times and Daily News, and tours regularly. Her play Cover Girls, which is an adaptation of the Bishop T. D. Jakes novel, was produced and toured by ClearChannel Entertainment. She is the recipient of a commission from the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Project. Her work has been read and performed nationally, including at the Cleveland Play House, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Kennedy Center.

Barnstormer, about Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman flyer, has received a developmental production at the Red Mountain Theatre in Birmingham Alabama, and readings at the York Theater Company, the Lark Play Development Center, and Stamford Center for the Arts; it has received a BareBones presentation at the Lark Play Development Center, a reading as part of Hartford Stage’s “Brand:NEW” Festival, and was presented as part of the National Alliance for Musical Theater’s 2008 Festival. Her play Corner Office was a finalist in the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s National Ten-Minute Play Contest.

Cheryl is a musical theater librettist and lyricist, and is an alumna of the Advanced Workshop of the BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. She is working on Barnstormer with composer Douglas J. Cohen (No Way to Treat a Lady, The Gig, Glimmerglass). She is also working on Sugar Dumpling with composer C. Colby Sachs; this piece is set during the American Civil War, and is loosely adapted from the short story Boule de Suif by Guy de Maupassant. She has a degree in English and a Certificate in Theatre and Dance from Princeton University, and has studied playwriting with Jean-Claude Van Itallie and Jeffrey Sweet. She was a Dramatists Guild Fellow in 2002, and was mentored by playwright/librettist Alfred Uhry. She is an alumna of the Playwrights’ Lab of the Women’s Project and Productions, of the River Writers Unit of the Ensemble Studio Theatre, and is a member of the Dramatists Guild and an associate artist of the Milk Can Theatre Company. She is the Vice President of Theater Resources Unlimited, a producers’ networking organization, and is a member of the Board of the League of Professional Theater Women. She is the recipient of a 2009 Writers’ Guild Award for her work as a writer for the daytime dramatic serial “As the World Turns”, and has been nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for her work on that show as well. She is a practicing attorney in Manhattan and is a partner with the firm of Menaker & Herrmann LLP.

Bio as of April, 2014

Jim Bauer is an American composer, librettist, songwriter and performing musician. A classically-trained pianist and self-taught guitarist and singer who turned to rock music in his teens, he studied classical music composition and theory at Haverford College with composers and mentors Harold Boatrite and John Davison, and has since found the blend of "serious" and "popular" music he has been looking for in music tied to narrative: music for stage, film and television. He has written, arranged, orchestrated, produced, and performed music for all of the above while winning some awards and earning a few distinctions along the way. His award-winning musical play The Blue Flower was produced at the A.R.T. in the fall of 2010 and Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theater in New York City in the fall of 2011 (enhancing producer in both cases, Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin). In early 2012 he began a collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz (Anna in the Tropics) on a new one-person one-act musical titled Farhad or The Secret of Being that was presented by producer Paulette Haupt at Urban Stages in New York City in the fall of 2012. In honor of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the American Civil War, he is currently developing with his wife -- visual artist Ruth Bauer -- a new musical that looks back on those 19th century events from a 21st century perspective.  Ruth and Jim are writing the script, Jim the music and lyrics. The project is being d eveloped under the auspices of Harvard University's American Repertory Theater.

Bio as of April, 2014.

Ruth Bauer is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.  Her oil paintings, watercolors, collages and monotypes have been shown in group exhibitions in museums and in solo exhibitions in galleries across the United States, including The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Hudson River Museum, The Tucson Museum of Art, and The DeCordova Museum. Her paintings, watercolors and monotypes are part of notable private and public collections, and her work has been reviewed in a number of art journals and newspapers, including Art News and The Boston Globe.  Her artwork has been published on book jacket covers for Houghton-Mifflin, Viking, Harvard University Press and Orchard Books.  Ruth collaborated with her husband, composer/lyricist Jim Bauer, on the book, art design and video projections for the multi-media musical The Blue Flower.

The Blue Flower was most recently produced at A.R.T.-The American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA in the fall of 2010 and Off-Broadway at 2nd Stage Theatre in the fall of 2011.  Ruth has been an artist-in-residence at the HERE Arts Center in New York.  Ruth is currently writing and illustrating a fictional journal of an amateur woman naturalist from the nineteenth century who has traveled to the mythical isle of Kokovoko (the home of the charismatic cannibal Queequeg in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick) to document the flora and fauna there.

Bio as of April, 2014.

Mark Campbell is one of the most in-demand librettists working in opera today, recently profiled in Opera News as one of twenty-five people "poised...to become major forces in opera in the coming decade."

He has collaborated with many leading composers of this generation, including Mark Adamo, William Bolcom, Ricky Ian Gordon, Jake Heggie, Martin Hennessy, Paul Moravec, John Musto, Kevin Puts, Richard Peaslee and Michael Torke. His most successful operas include Volpone, Later the Same Evening, Bastianello/ Lucrezia, Rappahannock County, and Silent Night.

Mark has received many prestigious awards for his work. Most recently, Silent Night was honored with the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Volpone received a 2010 Grammy® nomination for best Classical Recording. He also received the first Kleban Foundation Award for Lyricist, two Richard Rodgers Awards and a New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship.

As a lyricist, Mark penned all of the lyrics for Songs from an Unmade Bed, a theatrical song cycle with music by 18 composers including Jake Heggie and Duncan Sheik. The show has since been produced in many venues around the world. Other musicals for which he has written lyrics include: And the Curtain Rises, The Audience, Splendora, Akin, and Light Shall Lift Them.

Recordings of Mark’s works include the Grammy®-nominated Volpone, (Wolf Trap Recordings), Later the Same Evening (Albany Records), Bastianello/Lucrezia (Bridge Classical) and Songs from an Unmade Bed (Sh-k-Boom Records). Songs from an Unmade Bed  and Silent Night are also published by Bill Holab Music.

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Bio as of April, 2014

Amanda Green wrote the music and lyrics for the musical Hands On A Hardbody (based on the documentary film by S.R. Bindler) about a contest to win a truck in East Texas.  The book is by Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Doug Wright (I Am My Own Wife, Grey Gardens).

She wrote the lyrics for High Fidelity (Broadway 2006; composer Tony winner Tom Kitt). Also with Mr. Kitt, Debbie Does Dallas (addt’l lyrics) and special material for Kristin Chenoweth and Christine Ebersole.

Hand-picked by the legendary Arthur Laurents (Gypsy, West Side Story), she wrote additional lyrics for a revival of Hallelujah Baby (Arena Stage, directed by Mr. Laurents).  She costarred/wrote the lyrics for the NY Fringe Festival hit For The Love Of Tiffany: A Wifetime Original Musical (music Curtis Moore).

She wrote episodes for the Emmy Award-wining kids TV: show The Wonder Pets for Nick, Jr.(2008).   She has also been a regular contributor of comic essays to PLAYBOY Magazine.

In the 90’s, inspired by the music of Lyle Lovett, she developed a passion for country music, and spent time in Nashville co-writing and performing at their famed Bluebird Café.  She returns there this Fall to teach, co-write and perform.

Winner of The Jonathan Larson Award, and Abe Ohlman Award from The Songwriter’s Hall of Fame for Excellence in Songwriting.  L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award Nomination (Best Score), Backstage's Garland Award (Best Score) for Up The Week Without A Paddle (music Mr. Moore).   Winner of two MAC Awards and a Bistro Award for Best Comedy Song.

She and Broadway guest stars perform her songs everywhere from Carnegie Hall to Birdland to the Bluebird Cafe.   Her revue “Put A Little Love In Your Mouth! The Songs Of Amanda Green” sold-out at Off Broadway’s Second Stage Theater and Joe’s Pub.  The critically acclaimed CD is available at www.greenpiecemusic.com

This fall she will be performing at Feinstein’s at The Regency.

As an actress she has appeared on Broadway in the musicals Wonderful Town (Lincoln Center) and The Sheik Of Avenue B.  She originated the role of ‘Gary Coleman” in AVENUE Q at The O’Neill Center.  She spent two seasons at The Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Amanda is an alumnus of the BMI Lehman-Engel Musical Theatre Writing Workshop and a graduate of Brown University.   She lives in New York City with her husband Jeffrey Kaplan

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Cynthia Hopkins is the recipient of the 2007 Alpert Award in Theater, honoring her work as a writer, composer, performer, multi-instrumentalist, and theater artist. Her mission is to investigate new forms of theatrical communication which provoke emotion, stimulate the senses, and enliven the mind; obscuring the distinction between edification and entertainment through the creation of works which are as philosophical as they are entertaining, as intellectually challenging as they are viscerally emotional, as deeply comical as they are tragic, and as historically aware as they are immediately engaging. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the ensemble company Accinosco (www.accinosco.com) with whom she has created four full length multi-media performance works - Accidental Nostalgia (2005 Bessie Award for Creation), Must Don't Whip 'Um (2007 Bessie Award for Design), The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success) (conceived as Parts I, II, and III of The Accidental Trilogy); and The Truth: A Tragedy. These works feature the band Gloria Deluxe (www.gloriadeluxe.com), which Ms. Hopkins formed in 1999 and which has since produced eight full-length albums and performed at numerous venues in New York City and elsewhere. Accinosco's critically acclaimed works have been celebrated by multiple Bessie Awards, and have been supported by a host of institutional partners (foundations and presenters) including the Jerome Foundation, the MAP Fund, NYSCA, the Greenwall Foundation, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, APAP's Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Grant Program, the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation, the Philadelphia Performing Arts Festival, PICA's Time Based Art Festival, REDCAT, MASS MoCA, On the Boards, the Walker Art Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and St. Ann's Warehouse. Ms. Hopkins is currently at work on the creation of This Clement World, a new piece addressing the climate crisis. She is a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow.

Bio as of November, 2010.

Gihieh Lee grew up in Seoul, Korea and is still growing up in NYC. She won a 2004 Jonathan Larson Award and was a Musical Theatre Fellow in 2001-2002 at The Dramatists' Guild of America. Her musicals include: Shakespeare: The Remix (Book/Rap/Lyrics by Aaron Jafferis, commissioned by TheatreWorks, Palo Alto), Tock Tick (Book and Lyrics by Tim Nevits, which got a workshop at Second Stage Theatre in June 2002 and won a NYU Frederick Lowe Theatre Reading in October 2003, both directed by Graciela Daniele), Dreamland (Book and Lyrics by Robert Frisch, developed with Scott Schwartz.) Spamlet (Book, Lyrics and Direction by Anton Dudley). Other works include: Vocal Arrangement for Elegies: A Song Cycle by William Finn and incidental music for plays including Enchanted Pig, Greater Messapie, Cuchulain Cycle. As a Translator/Music Director, she just came back from her job in Seoul, Korea on I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. Current projects include You Are Not Me (with Aaron Jafferis), an upcoming musical Leaving Neverland (with Heejun Lee), expected in Seoul, Korea in 2005, and a translation of Man Of La Mancha. Her work has been performed in various places from Carnegie Hall, NYC to some nameless tiny venue in Seoul, Korea and by many people, from Betty Buckley to herself. M.F.A: The Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.

Bio as of September, 2008.

for Feeling Electric (now Next to Normal) by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey

Next to Normal received several workshop performances before it debuted Off-Broadway in 2008, winning the Outer Critics' Circle Award for Outstanding Score and receiving nominations for Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Actress (Alice Ripley) and Outstanding Score. After an Off-Broadway run, the show then played at the Arena Stage in its temporary venue in Washington, DC from November 2008 to January 2009.

The musical opened on Broadway in April 2009. It was nominated for eleven 2009 Tony Awards and won three, Best Original Score, Best Orchestration and Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical for Alice Ripley. It also won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, becoming just the eighth musical in history to receive the honor. The previous musical to win the Pulitzer was Rent, in 1996, which was also directed by Michael Greif. In awarding the prize to Kitt and Yorkey, the Pulitzer Board called the show "a powerful rock musical that grapples with mental illness in a suburban family and expands the scope of subject matter for musicals."

In addition to the 2003 Jonathan Larson grant, Nell Benjamin is the proud recipient of the 2003 Kleban Foundation Award for lyrics. Nell wrote lyrics for the musical Sarah, Plain And Tall (music by Laurence O'Keefe), which began as a children's musical for Theatreworks/USA, ran Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theater, and was developed into a full-length musical for general audiences at the 2003 Eugene O'Neill Music Theater Conference. The full-length version of Sarah was selected for the National Alliance for Musical Theater's 2003 conference. Meanwhile the children's version of Sarah continues to tour the country; a CD of the Lortel production is available from ShowBiz records. Nell also wrote lyrics for The Mice, one of three short musicals produced as 3hree by Harold Prince at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia, where it won the Barrymore Award for outstanding overall musical. 3hree was later produced at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles, where it was nominated for an Ovation Award. Nell continues her happy collaboration with award-winning composer Laurence O'Keefe. They are again working with Theatreworks/USA, writing book, music and lyrics for Cam Jansen And The Curse Of The Emerald Elephant, based on the popular series of children's books., They are also working on their new musical about love, jealousy and violence at a Renaissance Faire, tentatively titled Huzzah! and on several original movie musicals. Nell is writing the libretto to an original opera with composer Michael Roth, and has completed her first play.

Bio as of September, 2008.

Jeffrey Stock composes a wide range of music, including Broadway musicals, orchestral works, and opera. He composed the music for the Tony Award-nominated Broadway musical Triumph of Love, starring Betty Buckley, F. Murray Abraham, and Susan Egan.  TRIUMPH has received over 100 productions at theaters across the country and in Europe and Japan.

His hour-long symphonic and choral commission Lulie The Iceberg premiered at Carnegie Hall featuring the world’s most renowned cellist, Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Pamela Frank and saxophonist Paul Winter, narrated by Sam Waterston. Based on a book by Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamado of Japan, LULIE was recorded on Sony Classical and has also been performed and televised in Poland.

A Room With A View, a new romantic musical comedy, based on the classic E.M. Forster novel, recently had its world premiere at the San Diego Old Globe. It features a book by Marc Acito, music & lyrics by Jeffrey Stock, directed by Scott Schwartz. It will be produced next at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle.

Jeffrey is a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for music composition and the Jonathan Larson Grant. He was one of the composers of the Off-Broadway musical Songs from an Unmade Bed, which was presented to great acclaim at New York Theatre Workshop. A number of his songs have also been commissioned and premiered by the New York Festival of Song.  Throughout the 1990s, he served as musical theater columnist and critic for Tower Records’ national music magazine PULSE! He is also the author of the food blog fooditude.com.

In 2008 he conducted a concert in Beijing, featuring Broadway stars singing from the great American songbook. Since then, he has taught master classes in music drama at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and lectured at the Shanghai Music Conservatory and Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama. He has recently been commissioned by a Chinese theater company to compose a new musical about the Jewish ghetto of Shanghai.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Chris Miller (music) and Nathan Tysen (lyrics) have written The Burnt Part Boys (2010 Lucille Lortel Nomination, Best Musical) and Fugitive Songs (2008 Drama Desk Award Nomination, Outstanding Revue), both of which have cast albums available on Yellow Sound Label. Current projects include the Broadway-bound adaptation of the popular novel Tuck Everlasting (Direction by Casey Nicholaw, Book by Claudia Shear), a song for the new revue Stars of David, plus commissions from Lincoln Center Theater and Playwrights Horizons/Theatreworks Silicon Valley. Other work includes an adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (Boston Globe Top Ten Pick of 2008).  Television work includes songs for Sesame Street (2012 Daytime Emmy Award) and The Electric Company. Chris and Nathan apply for many awards and grants, and sometimes even win (Thank you Jonathan Larson, Richard Rodgers, Daryl Roth, Kitty Carlisle Hart, ASCAP, and the NEA).  They began their collaboration together at NYU where they received their MFA’s in musical theatre writing.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

for Magic Kingdom by Jake-ann Jones and Bruce Purse

for Miracle Brothers by Kirsten Childs

Kirsten Childs is a veteran performer who has gained recognition as a playwright and lyricist in musical theater. She won an Obie for The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin (2000). Her first full-length musical was Northstar (with composer Laurie Uguccioni). Childs is the co-writer of Sundiata, Lion King of Mali, and she adapted the 19th century poem, The Highwayman, for the McCarterTheater at Princeton University. As a performer, Childs co-starred with Chita Rivera in the musical Chicago, co-starred with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in the film See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and performed on Broadway in Dancin', Jerry's Girls, and Sweet Charity.  She has also written songs for jazz singer Dianne Reeves. Her honors include the Edward Kleban Award and the Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Musical Theatre Award. A native of Los Angeles, Childs graduated from New York University's Musical Theater Writing Program.

Gleefully defying classification, Debra Barsha is that rare talent that sees show business itself as a medium. Singer, songwriter, actress, composer, pianist, raconteur, Barsha is just as comfortable fueling the grooves on a George Clinton album as she is writing an Off-Broadway musical about a pop-art icon (Keith Haring-Radiant Baby). With a career that includes television soundtracks, children's musicals, one-woman shows, and national tours with postmod British pop-stars (Thomas Dolby), Debra Barsha manages to put the undeniable stamp of her own musical personality on the full spectrum of her work.

In 2002, Debra Barsha won a Jonathan Larson Grant for the score to Radiant Baby, which was produced at the Public Theater in 2003, directed by George C. Wolfe. Radiant Baby received 3 Lucille Lortel nominations including Outstanding Musical. As a co-lyricist in addition to composer, Debra worked alongside The Life’s Ira Gasman (lyrics) and Forever Plaid’s Stuart Ross (Book & Lyrics) to create not only to write a musical inspired by the life of graffiti artist Keith Haring, but to conceptually capture the spirit of 1980s New York club scene. “Throbbing melodies” (The New York Times), “a bright, boisterous lullaby” (Theatre Scene), a “show-stopping hedonistic inferno” (CurtainUp) were words that described Debra Barsha’s pop/soul/disco/funk infused score.

Additional composer credits include Sophie, based on the life of Sophie Tucker, (Jewish Repertory Theater), NBC’s Policewoman Centerfold soundtrack, and Barsha's one-woman musical Go To Your Womb, which was produced at The Triad, Don’t Tell Mama and The Hudson Guild Theatre (all in New York City) and at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, NY. It was also seen at NYC's Town Hall in An Evening of Uncommon Women sponsored by The Legacy Foundation. Her sequel A Womb With A View was produced at CAP21, NYC and The Passage Theatre in Trenton, NJ. and was chosen for the All For One Theater Festival at the Cherry Lane Theater, NY in 2012.

As an actress, Debra originated the role of Topeka Abotelli in the Off-Broadway production of Swingtime Canteen (Charles Busch) and appeared as Celeste Romano in the original cast of Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding, both of which she was also the musical director. For the last 6 months of its historic run, she was also the musical director for the Broadway production of Oh! Calcutta!

Barsha won an ASCAPlus Award each year from 1995-2002 and her songs have been recorded by Jackie Mason and Marty Balin among others. The title cut on George Clinton’s CD, T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The Awesome Power Of A Fully Operational Mothership) was written by Barsha, who also played keyboards and sang on Thomas Dolby's Flat Earth Tour and can be heard on Prince's compilation album 1-800-NEW FUNK. She has recorded with Bootsy Collins, Dave Stuart, Patti Austin, Thomas Dolby, George Clinton and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Her own CDs, Women in Windows and Barsha Raw! (Live at Ars Nova) were also recently released.

Her children’s musicals, The Moral of the Story, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and The Emperor’s New Condo have been performed annually in schools throughout the country. Recently, her music was heard in the critically acclaimed New York Theater Workshop’s Songs From an Unmade Bed, which is also released as a cast album on Ghostlight Records.

In 2006, Debra received a second Jonathan Larson grant to write the senior cabaret show for Larson’s alma mater, Adelphi University. Adelphi also produced an evening of Debra’s songs called I Was Here, which she directed.

In May 2008, Barsha and Horne were chosen for a two-week residency at The New Harmony Project for their mew musical The Center.

In 2011, Barsha conducted Karen O’s psycho opera Stop the Virgens at St. Ann’s Warehouse and The Sydney Opera House. In April of 2013, she arranged the gospel choir for Sacrilege, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ new single off their album Mosquito. Her appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs went viral, and inspired Spin Magazine to write, “pay close attention to the choir’s absolutely mind-blowing director, who arrives at the 2:29 mark. Watch this woman, and do not stop, people. She is embodying the spirit of Yeah as few others have done.”

Debra currently plays keyboards, sings and is the Associate Conductor of Broadway’s Tony award winning musical Jersey Boys.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Julia Jordan currently working on two musicals; Bernice Bobs Her Hair (book and lyrics, composed by Adam Gwon); and Storyville (original book, lyrics by Kristen Anderson Lopez, composed by Lisa De Spain.) She is also working on the feature film of her play Dark Yellow (Susan Smith Blackburn Award shortlist) which premiered at Studio Dante in 2006. A film based on the same play but entitled Tell Me Something I Don’t Know is currently in development. Other plays include, Tatjana in Color (The Francesca Primus Prize, short-listed for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Best Plays by Women 1997); Boy (Susan Smith Blackburn Award honorable mention); St. Scarlet; Nightswim; Smoking Lesson. Plays for children include, Summer Of The Swans; Guitar (music by Duncan Sheik); and Walk Two Moons (music by Lucas Pappaelias.) Other musicals include, The Mice (part of Harold Prince’s 3HREE) and Sarah, Plain and Tall (Kleban Award for libretto and an ATT Onstage award.) Her short film, The Hat, premiered at Sundance and was the most played short shown on Bravo and IFC that year. She wrote the book to The Moscow Circus’s Winter Queen tour. Lucille Lortel Fellow, Juilliard Playwright Fellow, Manhattan Theatre Club Fellow, Johnathan Larson Award winner, Member of New Dramatists and the Dramatists Guild Council. She holds an M. Phil. in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin and teaches advanced playwriting at Barnard and Primary Stages.

Bio as of 2010.

Working in musical theater, Michael Korie was nominated for the Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards as lyricist for Grey Gardens, composed by Scott Frankel with a book by playwright Doug Wright and direction by Michael Greif. Developed at The Sundance Institute, produced at Playwrights Horizons, transferred to Broadway in 2007, subsequently produced at leading theaters around America, in Japan and upcoming in the UK. Recorded on P.S. Classics. Awarded The American Academy of Arts Richard Rodgers Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award for outstanding musical. Selected for "The Best Plays Theater Yearbook" anthology. The musical’s route to Broadway was profiled in a documentary film by Albert Maysles broadcast on PBS, produced by East of Doheny. Also with composer Frankel, Korie created lyrics to Happiness, a musical with book by John Weidman and direction and choreography by Susan Stroman, produced by Lincoln Center Theater in 2009. Korie and Frankel's upcoming musical is Finding Neverland, produced by Weinstein Live Entertainment with book by Allan Knee and direction and choreography by Rob Ashford, scheduled for production in 2012. Doctor Zhivago premieres in Australia in March 2011 as a co-production of the Australian Opera with music by Lucy Simon, book by Michael Weller, lyrics by Korie and Amy Powers, directed by Des McAnuff. Upcoming is Beauty with composer Regina Spector and bookwriter/director Tina Landau, as well as a new musical commission by Playwrights Horizons with composer Frankel and playwright Richard Greenberg.

Bio as of 2012

Peter Mills wrote music and lyrics for Golden Boy of the Blue Ridge, a critically-acclaimed bluegrass adaptation of J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World set in 1930s Appalachia. 

Peter received the 2010 Kleban Award for lyrics, the 2007 Fred Ebb Award for emerging songwriters, 2006 Drama Desk Award nominations for his show The Pursuit of Persephone (Best Music and Best Orchestrations), the 2003 Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and a 2002 grant from the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation.

He supplied lyrics for Iron Curtain, (book by Susan DiLallo, music by Stephen Weiner), which received the 2006 IT Award for Best Musical, was workshopped at the 2008 Eugene O'Neill Musical Theatre Conference and showcased at the 2009 NAMT Festival. 

ILLYRIA, a musical adaptation of Twelfth Night, had its regional premiere at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in Fall 2004, with a cast album released in April 2005. The show is now licensed by Theatrical Rights Worldwide. And Peter's first full-length show, The Taxi Cabaret, was published by Samuel French in Fall 2004.

With Cara Reichel, he wrote The Flood, which was selected for the 2001 ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop. Marco Polo, written with composer Deborah Abramson, was selected for the ASCAP Musical Theater Workshop in 2000, and Peter and Deborah were chosen as 2000-01 Dramatists Guild Fellows. 

As composer/lyricist, other shows include The Alchemists, Lonely Rhymes, The Rockae, and Honor.

Peter holds an M.F.A. in Musical Theater Writing from New York University's Tisch School for the Arts and a degree in English/Dramatic Literature from Princeton University. He is a founding member of Prospect Theater Company.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

for Normal by Cheryl Stern, Tom Kochan and Yvonne Adrian

Cheryl Stern a Broadway veteran actress and writer, Cheryl has been featured on B'way in the 2010 Tony Award winning revival of La Cage Aux Folles, The Women (Roundabout Theatre, PBS) and Laughing Room Only.Candide, Cheryl recently received New England's IRNE Award for Best Supporting Actress. Off Broadway highlights include Mamie in First Lady Suite ( Drama Desk nom. Best Musical, Transport Group), Claire in Being Audrey, I Love You, You're Perfect, Alice B. Toklas in 27 Rue de Fleurus and Frannie in the 2012 NYMF Award winning A Letter To Harvey Milk.

Cheryl created lyrics for the critically acclaimed, Jonathan Larson Award winning, Off Broadway musical, Nor'mal:, starring Barbara Walsh. ( Book by Yvonne Adrian, music by Tom Kochan). The school adaptation of Nor'mal: is now enjoying much success touring the US as part of the NORMAL IN SCHOOLS program. She also contributed lyrics to Transport Group's hit Off Broadway production of The Audience (Drama Desk nom. Best Musical).

Other writing credits include: Being Audrey with Jim Hindman and Ellen Weiss, Requiem for William , Are We There Yet?, The Gene Game (EST), contributing writer of the Off Broadway revue, That's Life! (Outer Critic's Nom.), Buffalonia (solo performance, EST), new verses for Carnival of the Animals (Cleveland Orchestra), Littlest Light on the Christmas Tree (Vital Theatre) and A Christmas Survival Guide (contributing lyricist; Samuel French).

Cheryl is currently collaborating with Tom Kochan and Yvonne Adrian on Famous, A Hollywood musical. Famous is a 2011 TRU Musical Reading Series winner.

Cheryl is a graduate of Northwestern University.

Bio as of October, 2012.

For The Unknown by Janet Allard, Jean Randich and Shane Rettig

Janet Allard is a playwright and bookwriter/lyricist. Recent Works include: Pool Boy, a new musical with Composer Niko Tsakalakos (Barrington Stage, 2010) Vrooommm! A NASComedy (SPF 2007, published by Samuel French) appeared in Ariel Tepper's Summer Play Festival in NYC. Commissioned by Signature Theatre, Vrooommm! was developed at Theatreworks in Palo Alto and at Playlabs in Minneapolis. Untold Crimes of Insomniacs premiered at the Guthrie Lab in April, 2004. Incognito, Loyal and Fashionistas, all Guthrie Theater Commissions are published by Playscripts, Inc. Ms. Allard is the recipient of two Jerome Fellowships at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. Her work has been seen at The Guthrie Lab, The Kennedy Center, Mixed Blood, Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, The Yale Cabaret, The Women's Project, Perseverance Theatre, Joe's Pub, with P73 Productions, Ars Nova, NYMF, SPF, and Internationally in Ireland, England, Greece, Australia and New Zealand. She is a Macdowell Colony Fellow, and a Fulbright Fellow, has received a Jonathan Larson Award (with P73 productions). She attended the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at NYU as a bookwriter/lyricist, and has an M.F.A in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. She worked on the Fox Television series New Amsterdam. She currently teaches playwriting at UNCG in North Carolina.

Bio as of May, 2012.

He has written scores for the musicals A Catered Affair (Broadway), Urban Myths, Lavender Girl, the revue It's Only Life and the Dreamworks animated film Joseph, King of Dreams. His work has been recorded and performed by renowned pop, theatre and cabaret artists in venues including Carnegie Hall, The Metropolitan Opera, The Hollywood Bowl, The Sydney Opera House and The White House. Honors include The Mercer, Rodgers, Larson, Kleban and Fred Ebb Awards. Some recordings: Grateful, the Songs of John Bucchino, It's Only Life, Solitude Lessons, and On Richard Rodgers' Piano. In their Julie Andrews Collection, Harper Collins published a children's book, based on his song, called Grateful, A Song of Giving Thanks.

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Bio as of September, 2008.

Mindi is currently writing lyrics for three new musicals: Benny and Joon, based on the movie; Snow in August, based on the novel by Pete Hamill; and At The Beck, an original musical about the Cottingley Fairies, which was selected for residency and development at the Rhinebeck Writer’s Retreat.  She wrote book for A Wind in The Willows Christmas, which was commissioned by the Two River Theater and played there for two seasons running in 2012 and 2013.  Based on the well-loved children’s novel by Kenneth Grahame, A Wind in The Willows Christmas, has been given a new American spin for the holidays.

Other recent projects include: book and lyrics for Trip, an original musical inspired by the tales of Washington Irving, commissioned by Playwrights Horizons and with music by long-time collaborator Daniel Messé; and book for Toy Story - The Musical, commissioned by Disney Creative Entertainment.  Other produced work includes several musicals for the nationally acclaimed Theatreworks USA, including Nate The Great and The Mystery of King Tut; book and lyrics for Beasts and Saints, a musical comedy (Boston Music Theater Project, ASCAP Workshop, MTW's Fresh Voices), a one act contributed to an evening of short musicals under the umbrella title Notes Across a Small Pond (The Bridewell Theater, London), The Falling Man, an opera in 13 minutes (Cucaracha Theater), and The Magic Cookie, a 10-minute musical (New York Theater Workshop).  Plays include The Existential Gourmet, a tragicomedy (The Women's Project) and Guadeloupe, a farce (Westbeth Theater Center).

Mindi’s songs have been performed widely, most notably as part of Lincoln Center's American Songbook ("Hear and Now: Contemporary Lyricists”) and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.  In addition to the Jonathan Larson Foundation Award, Mindi has been honored with a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Playwriting Fellowship, two Playwriting Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, ASCAP Bernice Cohen Award, Second Stage Constance Klinsky Award for Excellence in Musical Theater, and a PEN International New Playwright Award (selected by Wendy Wasserstein).  She received her MFA from New York University's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, where she was an Oscar Hammerstein Fellow and where she now serves on the faculty.  Contact or follow her on Twitter @mindidickstein or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MindiDickstein

Bio as of June, 2014.

Messe's band, Hem, released its 2nd album (Eveningland) on Rounder Records October 2004. They have been featured on CNN, NPR, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. Eveningland was released in Europe on EMI. They are currently touring in support of the album.

Bio as of September, 2008.

Since winning a 2001 Larson Award, O'Keefe has had more than sixty productions of Bat Boy: The Musical produced nationwide. Larry wrote music and lyrics for Bat Boy, which began at the Actors' Gang in Los Angeles, won two Richard Rodgers Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a hit Off-Broadway, and won the Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics' Circle Awards for Best Musical. Bat Boy went to England and the West End. Larry also won the 2001 ASCAP Richard Rodgers New Horizon Award for his music and lyrics. With Fool Moon clown David Shiner, Larry is writing music and lyrics and collaborating on book for Drop Everything, a new clown show/musical which will be workshopped at ACT in Seattle. David and Larry have performed parts of Drop Everything at the Tollwood Arts Festival in Munich and at the Lisbon Comedy Festival. Larry has written songs for The Cat in the Hat, The Daily Show, and other movies and television. But Larry's favorite gig is his ongoing collaboration with the brilliant lyricist/bookwriter Nell Benjamin (see above), with whom he has written Sarah, Plain And Tall, The Mice, Cam Jansen And The Curse Of The Emerald Elephant, and many miscellaneous pieces, including the notorious Sensitive Song, which was nominated for a MAC Award but was deemed "too filthy". Larry has been performing his songs in New York, Boston and elsewhere, headlining at the Duplex and at the King Kong Room at The Supper Club with the inappropriately titled Larry's Luau Lounge. In February 2004 he conducted the Harvard University Pops Orchestra in an evening of his songs, including the world premiere of his short opera The Magic Futon.

Bio as of September, 2008.

Shortly after graduating music school and several years touring in jazz and rock bands, Rob moved to New York in the mid-80’s where he responded to a demand for authentic, hi-end music for film and television and founded the production music library, 8118 Music.  He gigged in clubs and pits off-Broadway  and also began collaborating with his brother Willie creating musical theater.  They are a winning combination:  Rob provides the music, Willie, the words.  They had several Off-Broadway successes before their production, A Year With Frog and Toad brought them to Broadway and garnered Rob a Tony nomination for Best Original Score Music.   While continuing to bring musical stories to the stage, he founded 4 Elements Music with a roster of fellow composers which allowed him to expand on the work he started with 8118 Music.

Since its inception, 4 Elements Music has grown tremendously as Rob and his team work extensively in providing music for major network news, dramatic series and documentaries, film, and commercials.  The 4EM library now includes over 5,000 cuts by a roster of over 40 accomplished composers, and regularly provides music for ABC’s Good Morning America, 20/20,  and PrimeTime.  Other regular clients include NBC, CBS, Showtime and many others.  4 Elements Music has now recently expanded worldwide, having signed deals with sub publishers and distributors throughout Europe, Asia and Australia.

In addition to scoring for many demanding television and film projects, Rob continues to work on several musical theatre productions, including Johnny Baseball, which will be running August 2012 at the Village Theatre Festival Of New Musicals (Seattle) after a highly successful run at the A.R.T.  (Cambridge) in 2010.  Johnny Baseball producers are currently planning the show’s route to New York.  Outside of work, Rob is passionate about cooking, perfecting his tennis game, and spending time with the production of which he’s most proud, his son Gabe.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

In 2008 Charlie Crosses the Nation an opera in a Jazz idiom (music, libretto, orchestration), was performed by the New York City Opera as part of the VOX festival of new opera. A Thousand Words Come to Mind written with playwright, Michele Lowe was commissioned by Paulette Haupt and opened at The Zipper Theatre starring Tony Nominee, Barbara Walsh. A Star Across the Ocean, a work for 4 voices and symphony orchestra, was premiered by the Montclair State University Symphony featuring Tony Award-winner Chuck Cooper.

Other musical theatre works include music for Coyote Goes Salmon Fishing (with Deborah Brevoort), directed by Molly Smith at Perseverance Theatre and produced by Stuart Ostrow in Houston; and Sanctuary D. C., a rap musical about the homeless in Washington (Helen Hayes Award nomination).

His play-scores have been heard at resident theatres around the country including The Old Globe, The Alliance, and Madison Repertory Theatre. Highlights include the world premiere of Lee Blessing’s Cobb featuring Oscar Winner, Chris Cooper and Delroy Lindo at The Yale Repertory and the U. S. premiere of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Christopher Columbus at the New Federal Theater.

As an actor, Mr. Richards originated the role of Sylvester in the original Broadway production of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.  Frank Rich’s review of that production (praising Mr. Richards performance among others) was recently included in Ben Brantley’s compilation of the NY Times reviews of 25 productions which defined the 20th century. Mr. Richards also assisted his father, Lloyd Richards, in the origination of 3 other Wilson works.

Mr. Richards is a recipient of the Jonathan Larson and the Frederick Loewe awards. He is associate professor of musical theatre at Montclair State University’s Cali School of Music, and has been a member of the faculty at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program since 1997. From 1995-2005, he was a teaching artist with Lincoln Center Institute, where he also authored publications for the Heckscher Foundation Research Center on such various subjects as The Blues, Margaret Leng Tan (The Art of the Toy Piano), and the tangos of Astor Piazzolla.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Bio as of October 2018.

for The Snow Queen by Ruth Mackenzie

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Blatt's lyric/book-writing has won her recognition that includes a grant from NAMT for her new musical Oneida (commissioned by the Village Theatre), the Georgia Bogardus Holof Lyricist Award (the O'Neill), the 2econd Stage Theatre Klinsky Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre, a Jonathan Larson Foundation grant, and a Dramatists' Guild fellowship. Her show The Mistress Cycle (composer Jenny Giering) won The Directors' Choice Award at NYMF, and the show was also presented at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Theatre Works Palo Alto, and Barrington Stage. Her work has been featured at NAMT (Princess Caraboo), developed at Goodspeed (Hashi with composer/lyricist Jeff Blumenkrantz), and produced by TheatreWorks USA (Island of the Blue Dolphins). Beth is founder/CEO of Hope Sings, a for-benefit music organization whose mission is to harness the power of song and story to empower, inspire and connect women around the world via various social causes. Their most recent effort is the theme song for UN Women, the new United Nations agency, for which Beth wrote the lyric. www.hopesings.net. Beth is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth College and of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop.

Bio as of November, 2011.

Jenny Giering's Website>>

Composer Matthew Sklar and Lyricist / Bookwriter Chad Beguelin have been writing musicals together for over fifteen years. They received Tony Award Nominations and Drama Desk Award Nominations for their work on The Wedding Singer which debuted on Broadway at the Al Hirschfeld Theater. They wrote the score for the Broadway musical Elf which will also debuted at Al Hirschfeld Theater for the holiday season.

Other credits include The Rhythm Club (Signature Theater) and Wicked City (American Stage Company, Mason Street Warehouse) and various projects for Disney.

Together they are the recipients of The Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award, The Edward Kleban Award for Outstanding Lyric Writing and the Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Musical Theater Award.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Their songs have been performed at Carnegie Hall (Michael Feinstein: Now and Then Series), Lincoln Center (American Songbook Series), Joe's Pub, Birdland, Symphony Space, The Kennedy Center, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Their songs have been premiered by Kristin Chenoweth (Carnegie Hall), Rebecca Luker (The Kennedy Center), Marin Mazzie, Jason Danieley, Stephanie J. Block, Susan Egan, and Liz Callaway. Together they have received the Jonathan Larson Award, and as a composer, Paul is the recipient of the 2010 Burton Lane Award. Recordings of their work appear on Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley's Opposite You, Stephanie J. Block's This Place I Know, and Rebecca Luker's Greenwich Time. (Sorta) Love Songs, their debut CD, will be released in November 2010 on the Sh-K-Boom Records label. Their musical Six of One, (re-titled The Extraordinary Ordinary), received a Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Grant, an ASCAP workshop, a CAP21 workshop, and a production in the Philly Fringe Festival. Musical revues include Love Songs and Other Crap (MAC Award nomination) and Sorta Love Songs (Birdland). Ella Minnow Pea, their new musical, received a production at the University of Michigan.

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Bio as of November, 2010.

When an evening of David Kirshenbaum’s music was presented at Joe’s Pub in New York City last November, in a star-studded event entitled Places You’ve Never Been Before, TheaterMania.com called him “one of the most prolific and exciting composer/lyricists writing today.”  David penned the music and lyrics for the off-Broadway musical Summer of ’42 (book by Hunter Foster), which has just been released as a two-CD set on JAY Records. His new show Party Come Here (book by Daniel Goldfarb) was an invited selection in the 2006 New York Musical Theatre Festival and is having its world premiere production at the Williamstown Theatre Festival this summer. Vanities – A New Musical, his adaptation of the long-running hit play (book by its original writer, Jack Heifner), will be appearing on a New York stage next season after winning the 2006 San Francisco Theatre Critics Circle Awards for Best Musical and Best Score in its first production at TheatreWorks in California.

Other shows include Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus (book by Myles McDonnell), which was first seen at Mill Mountain Theatre, and has been performed regionally since then at the holiday season. David’s work has been produced at many other theatres nationwide, among them Goodspeed Musicals, Round House Theatre, The York Theatre Company, Casa Manana, Seacoast Rep, and Dayton’s Victoria Theatre. He has received grants from the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s Producer-Writer Initiative (establishing a residency for him at the Goodspeed Opera House), and the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation. David is also a contributing songwriter to the childrens’ TV series Johnny and the Sprites (currently airing on The Disney Channel).

Upcoming projects include Sing Me a Happy Song, a revue co-written with songwriter Georgia Stitt, which will be featured as part of the first-ever Festival of New American Musicals, in Los Angeles in 2008; If You Give a Pig a Pancake (and other stories), a family show for TheatreworksUSA; Love In The Afternoon (book by Daniel Goldfarb), based on the Billy Wilder movie starring Audrey Hepburn; and an original musical with book by Joe DiPietro (co-author of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change).  A native of New York City, David has a Bachelor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

David and his partner, Will Todd, had a successful first production of The Screams Of Kitty Genovese at the Boston Conservatory of Music. They are currently working with director John Caird and producer John Schreiber on a workshop/reading presentation at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre, towards the goal of a first class NYC or regional production in the United States. David and Will are currently working on Dream Ballet, a Quantum mechanics variation on the Walter Mitty tale. David is also working with composer Ross Paterson on Glen Or Glenda, an updating of the Ed Wood classic movie. In September 2002, David and Will premiered And My Friend, a chorale tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attack, at the Brave New World Festival at Town Hall.

Bio as of September, 2008.

Most recently, John’s new musical Through the Looking Glass returned to the Maltz Jupiter Theatre for a second year.  A contemporary retelling of the Lewis Carroll classic, Looking Glass tells the story of modern-day Alice who is bullied by classmates and takes a trip through her mirror to figure out how to cope.   The original cast album is now available on ITunes.  Last summer his new musical, The Bootlegger and the Rabbi’s Daughter was presented in readings at the New York Musical Theatre Festival and at the Dorset Theatre in Vermont.   Next month, Bootlegger will be part of the Future Songbook Series at NYPL at Lincoln Center.

In 2012, John’s musical Academy (for which he wrote book, music and lyrics) had its regional world premiere at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre where it was named one of the top ten best shows of 2010 by South Florida Theatre Review.  Before this, Academy won the award for Best Musical at the Daegu International Musical Festival (DIMF). Before that, it completed its sold-out run at the New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF), where it was twice extended.  Academy received the NYMF Awards for Excellence in Music and Honorable Mention for Excellence in lyrics, Outstanding Musical and Outstanding Direction (John Carrafa).  It also received the DIMF Award, which honored the show with a production at the Daegu International Musical Theatre Festival in South Korea this summer.  In 2009, John was awarded the ASCAP Foundation Cole Porter Award for music and lyrics for his work on Academy.  Before NYMF, Academy was developed at workshop at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre funded by a MacArthur grant.

John is also the recipient of an award from the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation and a Commendation Award from the Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Musical Theater Foundation.

In 2008 his new musical Myth was developed at the O’Neill Music Theater Conference, where John received The Georgia Holof Lyricist Award for his work.  John is one of a handful of artists to be chosen to attend the O’Neill twice, having been there in 1998 with his musical A Tailor’s Tale.

With collaborator Tajlei Levis, he wrote Glimpses of the Moon (published by Samuel French) which played in the Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel in New York.  It had its regional premiere at MetroStage in Alexandria  and was also produced at  the Georgia Ensemble Theatre.  The original cast recording  is available on Itunes and cdbaby.   Also with Ms. Levis, he wrote the music for A Time to Be Born, based on the novel by Dawn Powell, which played at the Lucille Lortel theatre as part of the New York Fringe Festival.

John wrote the score and co-wrote the book to Diva Diaries which ran for three months at the Lakeshore Theatre in Chicago.  Before that, it played at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.

Other works include:  The Riverhaven Book Club (the Lyric Theatre, Florida), 1001 Nights, (workshop at the George Street Theatre) and Arturo’s Window.

John has also composed the incidental music to plays and the scores to three ballets including one on which he collaborated with former New York City Ballet dancer and choreographer Miriam Mahdaviani. He received degrees from the Eastman School of Music and NYU and was a member of the BMI Advanced Musical Theatre Workshop.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

for A Fish Story by Erin Purcell, Gregory Jackson and Michael Garin

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for The Girl Most Likely to... by Zina Goldrich, Marcy Heisler, Denis Markell and Douglas Bernstein

Zina and Marcy's Website>>

She is in the midst of finishing her musical Miracle Brothers, which will be produced next season at the Vineyard Theatre. She is also working on musicals with Walter Mosley, and Charles Randolph-Wright.

Bio as of September, 2008.

A composer, arranger, conductor, and pianist, winner of the Jonathan Larson Award for composition. His work as composer is featured on the P.S. Classics release Love on a Summer Afternoon: The Songs of Sam Davis, and his new musical Bunnicula, co-written with Charles Busch and Mark Waldrop, will open in February 2013 at Off-Broadway's Daryl Roth Theater. Broadway credits as pianist/conductor include Curtains, The Apple Tree, Follies, Cabaret, and the upcoming Big Fish. He was music supervisor for Dreamgirls in Korea, Japan, South Africa, at the Apollo Theater, and on national tour. He has been arranger, orchestrator, and/or music director for many shows regionally, including most recently James and the Giant Peach (Goodspeed) and The Trumpet of the Swan (Kennedy Center). Sam is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Music.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Received an NEA grant, the Richard Rodgers Development Award, the Stephen Sondheim Award and a Jonathan Larson Grant for his music and lyrics to The Hidden Sky, which premiered at Prince Music Theater/American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia (seven Barrymore Award nominations) and was subsequently produced by Prospect Theater Company in NYC. Concert versions have been performed at Joe's Pub and Ars Nova in NYC. He was one of eighteen composers who contributed to Songs Ffrom an Unmade Bed at New York Theater Workshop (lyrics by Larson Grant recipient Mark Campbell, original cast recording on Sh- K-Boom Records). As lyricist, he recently created the English translation for Kurt Weill's Magic Night, published by European American Music Corporation.

Projects in development include an original work with librettist Ellen McLaughlin and director Michael Greif, commissioned by the Public Theater; Bloom, an original musical comedy; and I Capture The Castle, commissioned by Signature Theater as part of their American Musical Voices: The Next Generation program. Peter has written incidental music for several plays, including Newton's Universe (St. Ann's Warehouse Labapalooza), and Henry V (Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey), and his songs have been performed uptown (Lincoln Center's American Songbook, New York Festival of Song) and downtown (LaMaMa, Joe's Pub) as well as throughout the country.

Peter is an alumnus of Yale University, the New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio, the BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop and the American Lyric Theater's Composer-Librettist Development Program. He is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell and Millay colonies, the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Music Theater Conference and the Sundance Playwrights Retreat at Ucross.

He is also composer for the Emmy-nominated PBS series, Art:21.

Bio as of October, 2012.

Born on May 15, 1956 in Oceanside, NY and raised on Long Island. After studying piano, composition and acting, at Carnegie Mellon University, he settled in New York City, where he quickly emerged as a leading writer of vocal music that spans art song, opera, and musical theater. Mr. Gordon's songs have been performed and or recorded by such internationally renowned singers as Renee Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Nathan Gunn, Kelli O'Hara, Audra MacDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Nicole Cabell, the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Frederica Von Stade, Andrea Marcovicci, Harolyn Blackwell, and Betty Buckley, among many others.

As a teacher Mr. Gordon has taught both Master Classes and Composition Classes in Colleges and Universities throughout the country including Yale, NYU, Northwestern, Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, Catholic, Bennington, Vassar, Carnegie-Mellon, Elon, Michigan State, U of Michigan, Point Park (McGinnis Distinguished Lecturer) Texas Lutheran University, and San Francisco Conservatory. He has been the featured Composer-in Residence at various festivals including Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, The Hawaii Performing Arts Festival, Songfest at Pepperdine University, Chautauqua, Aspen Music Festival, and Ravinia.

Among his honors are an OBIE Award, the 2003 Alumni Merit Award for exceptional achievement and leadership from Carnegie-Mellon University, A Shen Family Foundation Award, the Stephen Sondheim Award, The Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Theater Foundation Award, The Constance Klinsky Award, and many awards from ASCAP, of which he is a member, The National Endowment of the Arts, and The American Music Center.

Mr. Gordon's works are published by Williamson Music, Carl Fischer Music, and Presser Music and available everywhere.
His works are also widely recorded on various labels.

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Bio as of April, 2014.

Received, in addition to two Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation grants, a New American Works Grant from the NEA, the first Johnny Mercer Emerging American Songwriter Award, and with his principal collaborator, Robert L. Freedman, both the Kleban Award for Lyric Writing and the Fred Ebb Songwriting Award. He wrote the title track to the hit film, Mad Hot Ballroom. Up next is his new musical, written with Robert Freedman, A Gentleman's Guide To Love and Murder, which will open September '10 at the La Jolla Playhouse, starring Jefferson Mays, and directed by Darko Tresjnak. Other musicals include The Wayside Inn, Esmeralda, Almost September, and Campaign Of The Century, which was presented in a concert version in as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and in New York as part of the New York Musical Theater Festival, both starring Michael Rupert. He performs his songs across the country, and can be heard on his debut CD, The Time It Takes.

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Bio as of February, 2010.

for The Princess and the Black-Eyed Pea by Karole Foreman and Andrew Chukerman

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Winner of the Richard Rodgers Award, the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award, and the Edgerton Award as composer/co-lyricist of the musical, The Princess and the Black-Eyed Pea, Chicago-native Andrew works extensively in film, television, theatre, and concert venues as a composer, orchestrator, music director, and keyboardist. The Princess and the Black-Eyed Pea recently enjoyed its world premiere at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Fall, 2008. Andrew's keyboard work appears on Rod Stewart's series of multi-platinum, Grammy-winning standards albums, The Great American Songbook, Vols. 1 - 3, with combined sales of more than 10 million units. He also wrote multiple arrangements used on Mr. Stewart's A & E & BBC Network concert specials and world tour. Andrew more recently worked as arranger and keyboardist on Carly Simon's Grammy-nominated CD, Moonlight Serenade. Other artists he has performed with include Stevie Wonder, LeAnn Rimes, Carole King, Johnny Mathis, Stephanie Mills, Bette Midler, David Foster, David Hyde Pierce, Faith Prince, and Diahann Carroll. As a composer and musician, Andrew has worked on such primetime network TV series as Frasier, Murphy Brown, The Wonder Years, Boston Public, Charmed, and Even Stevens. He received the Grand Prize for "Best Score" at the 2006 Rhode Island International Film Festival, in addition to earning "Best Sound/Score" at the 2006 ReelHeART International Film Festival of Toronto for the feature film, Le Chase.

He was also hired to do all of the historical period music research for the well-received feature film Tombstone, in addition to scoring national and worldwide TV commercial campaigns for such corporations as Dodge, Cisco, and Motorola. Andrew made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2000 as a composer and pianist with the New York Pops Orchestra for his original work, My Only Son, and his gospel arrangement of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus was commissioned by the Atlanta Symphony. This arrangement continues to enjoy performances by major orchestras across the country, as well as repeated airings nationally on PBS.

Originally from Chicago, Andrew possessed perfect pitch at the age of four and was recommended to study jazz, modern harmonic theory, and improvisational piano with the highly esteemed Lucille Gould. Post-secondary studies brought him to Los Angeles where he was a music major at Occidental College, completed two full-time programs at the Grove School of Music in Composing, Arranging, and Film Scoring, and earned two fellowships in film scoring with both ASCAP and BMI. Andrew has had the honor of performing before Charles, Prince of Wales, as well as Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore. He is a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS), the Recording Academy (NARAS), ASCAP, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG).

Bio as of February, 2010.

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for The Vanishing Point by Rob Hartmann, Scott Keys and Liv Cummins

Rob Hartmann has written more than a dozen musicals which have been produced by theater companies across the United States. Upcoming productions in 2014 include Vanishing Point at Teatro Lara in Madrid (in a new Spanish translation), opening in June.

Rob is on the faculty of New York University’s Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program, where he received his MFA. He has written numerous articles on theater for the Encyclopedia Americana, including the revision and expansion of Ethan Mordden's history of musical theater. He has been a guest lecturer in the Yale School of Drama, taught musical theater history at Lincoln Center, and has also written a number of study guides for Broadway productions, including Wicked, Titanic, 1776, Kiss Me Kate, Amadeus, Aida, Jane Eyre, 42nd Street, Copenhagen, Into the Woods and Hairspray.

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Bio as of April, 2014

Born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1984 he relocated to New York City after a year performing in Los Angeles. Paul wrote the book, music, and lyrics for Bright Lights Big City, which was presented at the New York Theater Workshop (directed by Michael Greif), The Guggenheim Museum, the Prince Music Theater, Philadelphia and Harvard University. The CD of the show, starring Patrick Wilson, Sherie Renee Scott, Jesse L. Martin, and Christine Ebersole is available on Sh-K-Boom Records and the live rights are available through The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization.

Goodman's other produced musicals include: Him & Her, Prince Music Theater, March 2007, and the New York International Fringe Festival, ( 2002 Best Performance Award ); ROOMS, produced by the University of Michigan and the New York Musical Theatre Festival in September 2005, (directed by Scott Schwartz); Alive in the World produced by New York Musical Theater Festival, September 2006; God Save the New Wave (Bottom Line, West Bank Theater); Metropolitan Music (Marymount Manhattan College); Just East of Broadway (The Duplex).

Paul Scott Goodman was the first recipient of the Songwriters' Hall of Fame Best New Songwriter Award, winner of the Backstage Bistro Award for Domestica (book, music and lyrics), first solo recipient of the Jonathan Larson Foundation Award, and winner of the Gilman Gonzalez-Falla Theater Foundation Commendation Award. In London, Paul's musicals have also been produced at the National Theater, The New End Theater, and twice on BBC TV. He has performed with John Cougar Mellancamp, Joan Armatrading, David Essex, and The Average White Band. He lives in Soho, Manhattan with his wife and three children.

Bio as of September, 2008.

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