KOKAYI is a GRAMMY-nominated musician, Guggenheim Fellow, and DC-based multidisciplinary artist. An improvisational vocalist and producer, he focuses his passion and work on transforming Black diasporic narratives into participatory works across sound, film, and visual media. Author of You Are Ketchup: and other Fly Music Tales, he bridges art, culture, and technology through strategy and storytelling. KOKAYI also hosts the Future Money Podcast for the Interledger Foundation and serves on the board of Found Sound Nation. When he’s not making art across disciplines, you can usually find him somewhere on a stage or in a studio exploring new sonic terrain.
Psalmayene 24
Psalmayene 24 is an award-winning playwright, director, and actor. He is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Mosaic Theater Company. Playwriting credits include Young John Lewis: Prodigy of Protest (book & lyrics), Monumental Travesties, Dear Mapel, and Les Deux Noirs at Mosaic Theater Company; Young John Lewis (book & lyrics) at Theatrical Outfit; Out of the Vineyard at Joe’s Movement Emporium; and Cinderella: The Remix at Imagination Stage. Directing credits include Tempestuous Elements at Arena Stage; Metamorphoses (Helen Hayes Award, Outstanding Direction of a Play) at Folger Theatre; Purlie Victorious, The Colored Museum, Good Bones, Flow, and Pass Over at Studio Theatre; Native Son at Mosaic Theater Company; and Word Becomes Flesh (Helen Hayes Award, Outstanding Direction of a Play) at Theater Alliance.
Psalm, as his colleagues call him, is a recipient of Theatre Washington’s Victor Shargai Leadership Award. On Instagram: @psalmayene24.
Ryan Amador
Ryan Amador is a creative at the intersections of music, theater, audio, and film. As a singer-songwriter, he has released four full length albums and six EP’s of original music, and is best known for his song “Instead” and anthemic videos “Define Me,” “Spectrum” and “Like A Woman,” a collaboration with global women’s rights organization VDay. As a theater-maker, he has directed and written theater pieces in New York City, Los Angeles, Edinburgh Fringe, Cincinnati Fringe, New Orleans, Seattle, and Abu Dhabi. He is the story producer for two iHeart Radio podcasts and has produced numerous media projects alongside The Future Perfect Project, a non-profit for LGBTQ+ youth across America, which he co-founded alongside Celeste Lecesne. Their musical Q2 was supported by The New Harmony Project and is still in development. IG: @ryanamador / ryanamador.com
Bleu Beckford-Burrell
Bleu Beckford-Burrell is a first-generation Jamaican-American Multi-hyphened Artist. Born and raised in New York City, she works for non-profit organizations where she teaches acting to teens, directs plays, and leads playwright workshops for adults. She is in the process of writing her debut novel, Xaymaca’s Shadow, and completing her pentalogy of plays, The End of the Line Anthology. Some of her plays include: La Race (Page 73 Productions & The Working Theater, 2022) Tr@k Grls (EST One-Act Marathon, 2022), A Little Bit of Tea with That (Keen Teen Company, 2022/Concord publishing 2023). She received the 2020 Playwrights Horizons, Jody Falco & Jeffrey Steinman Commission for Emerging Playwrights, 2021 South Coast Repertory, Elizabeth George Emerging Writer Commission, and 2022 Keen Company, Keen Teens Commission. M.F.A. Rutgers University
BleuBeckford.com
Kristiana Rae Colón
Kristiana Rae Colón is a poet, playwright, actor, educator, producer, curator, creator of the event series #BlackSexMatters, co-founder of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, and Writer/Producer on Showtime’s hit series The Chi. Her collection of poems promised instruments was the winner of the inaugural Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize and published by Northwestern University Press and her play Tilikum is the winner of a Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Play. She presently serves as the Scribe Queen alongside Maroon Queen Cherice Harrison-Nelson as a founding member of the emerging Queen Reesie Collective, harnessing the power of New Orleans' unique cultural traditions into new forms of activism, awareness, and consciousness raising activations.
Sarah Galante
Sarah Galante (she/her) is a queer playwright based in Brooklyn, New York, where she lives with her spouse and their neurotic corgi, Hoagie. Her work centers bodies onstage, particularly fat bodies, and blends absurdism, dark humor, and emotional realism to interrogate systems of power, shame, and survival. Sarah is the winner of the 2025 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the 2025 Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. She was a finalist for the inaugural Terrence McNally Recovery Commission, received a 2026 Honorable Mention from the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and was a Core Apprentice at The Playwrights’ Center under the mentorship of Jen Silverman. She has collaborated with The Playwrights Foundation, The O'Neill Center, Lincoln Center, and more. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Dramatic Writing at New York University, class of 2027.
Ty Defoe
Ty Defoe (he/we) is an Indigiqueer citizen of the Anishinaabe and Oneida Nations, and a writer, playwright, and interdisciplinary artist. A sovereign story trickster, Ty has received fellowships and support from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, MacDowell, Sundance Institute, New Harmony Project, Joyce Foundation, PlayPenn, and Pop Culture Collaborative’s Trans Futurist Initiative, and was named a 2026 United States Artist Fellow. Their work has been honored with the Jonathan Larson Award, a Grammy Award, and the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award. Their play Firebird Tattoo is published in Methuen Drama’s Book of Trans Plays (Bloomsbury), and their work appears in Consider the Rainbow (dir. Shontina Vernon). Working across theater, film, VR/XR, and ceremony, Ty creates with rural communities, Broadway, and digital spaces to foster Indigenous and decolonial futures rooted in liberation. Ty loves mood rings. AllMyRelationsCollective.Earth | tydefoe.com | NYC
Peter Gil-Sheridan
Peter Gil-Sheridan is a Cuban-American playwright whose play This Space Between Us was produced off-Broadway by Keen Company and developed at New Harmony and P73. Cockfight, written at SoHo Rep’s Writer/Director Lab, was developed by PlayPenn and produced as a podcast by The Parsnip Ship.
His plays Useful People and Medea and Her Sons were developed at Powerhouse. Maybe When You’re Older was developed at The Playwrights’ Center’s PlayLabs.
He was recently commissioned by History Theatre to write the musical Marielitos, about the Mariel Boatlift, in collaboration with Cristina Luzurraga and Julián Mesri, with development at Powerhouse in July. Other work includes Ritu Comes Home, commissioned and premiered by InterAct Theatre Company, and Topsy Turvy Mouse, produced by the Cherry Lane Mentor Project and Borderlands Theater. The Rafa Play was produced by The Pool, a pop-up theatre company he founded with Lynn Rosen and Susan Bernfield.
He teaches at Vassar College.
MJ Kaufman
MJ Kaufman (he/they) is a writer living in Brooklyn. Their plays have been seen at the Public Theater, WP Theater, NAATCO, Clubbed Thumb, Colt Coeur, Williamstown Theater Festival, InterAct Theater and numerous other theaters and schools around the country as well as in Russian in Moscow and in Australia. MJ has held residencies at the New Museum, MacDowell Colony, SPACE on Ryder Farm and are currently a resident playwright at New Dramatists. MJ co-founded Trans Lab Fellowship, a program to support emerging transgender theater artists which ran from 2018-2022. They are currently on the board and part of the core community of Breaking the Binary Theatre. MJ’s short film Therapist Crush won the Audience Choice Best Film Award at TRANSlations film festival. MJ has also written for Netflix. They recently completed the Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship at the Center for Fiction and are at work on a novel. They have a dog named Milkshake.
Sondai NaNaBuluku
Sondai NaNaBuluku is a Dramatic Writer obsessed with spirituality, authenticity, and Black celebrations of joy in the face of a world gone mad. He believes that joy and love are the only way to survive in an environment ripe for the survival of bad people; every day is a battle where heroes cannot succumb to the whims of EVIL. On stage, that manifests as men that hug their children, caress their partners lovingly, speak gently, and laugh loudly. He has worked with Working Title Playwrights in the Atlanta area as a reader and assistant dramaturg, a participant in Theatre Masters’ Take Ten Playwriting Competition with his play Rain Ceremony (2025), was awarded a grant from the Sloan Foundation for his screenplay Mother Bear (2025), and was the recipient of ACTF's Hip-Hop Theatre Creator Award with his play DOOMPOCALYPSE (2026). He believes that through battles alongside whimsical creatures we can better understand one another (Some would call him a Pokémon fanatic).
a.k. payne
a.k. payne (they&she) is a playwright, artist-theorist, and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their plays love on and engage the interdependencies of Black pasts, presents and futures and seek to find/remember language that might move us towards our collective liberation(s).
They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College and an MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from fka Yale School of Drama. A 2023-2024 Van Lier New Voices Fellow, their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award. Her work has been a 3x finalist and 2025 winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the oldest and largest international prize honoring women+ playwrights. She is currently a resident artist/fellow with National Black Theatre’s I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency and Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Foundation).
Nia Akilah Robinson
Nia Akilah Robinson (she/her) is a playwright and actor who reps Harlem with all her might.
Productions: Soho Rep U.S. Off Broadway Premiere (2025 New York Times Critics Pick), NextStop Theatre (2026 Helen Hayes Recommendation), Co-Pro: Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company & Company One Theatre, Urbanite Theatre, Theatre503, Theatre Exile, and The Hearth. Her work has been seen and developed with Nashville Repertory Theatre (Ingram New Works Project), Steppenwolf Theatre, The New Group, The Ground Floor: Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Great Plains Theatre Conference, SPACE on Ryder Farm, EST, Waterwell, Classical Theatre of Harlem, and New Georges. Nia is a member or alumna of Ensemble Studio Theatre's Youngblood, I-73 at Page 73, The Orchard Project NYCGreenhouse, The Wish Collective, and TheBlackHERthePen. Education: Yale (DGSD- MFA Playwriting Candidate) & Juilliard ‘24 (Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program).
https://www.niaakilahrobinson.com
Caity-Shea Violette
Caity-Shea Violette is a playwright and screenwriter based in LA. Her plays include Rx Machina (Kennedy Center’s Harold & Mimi Steinberg Award, Clauder Competition Gold Prize, Judith Royer Award Finalist), Reap the Grove (Jean Kennedy Smith Award, ScreenCraft’s Stage Writing Award Runner-Up), Slow Jam (Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival Winner), Target Behavior (National Partners of American Theatre Award), and others. Her work has been developed, commissioned, or presented by Roundabout Theatre Company, The Kennedy Center, Portland Stage Company, Great Plains Theatre Commons, The New Harmony Project, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Climate Change Theatre Action, San Pedro Playhouse, Know Theatre of Cincinnati, Mirrorbox Theatre, Matrix Theatre Company, and more. Her pilot Culture Fit was a semifinalist for Austin Film Festival’s Drama Teleplay Pilot Competition and the AMC One-Hour Pilot Award. MFA in Playwriting: Boston University. www.caitysheaviolette.com
Kap Taylor
Kap Taylor is a midwestern butch writer, director and ex Division I Athlete based in Los Angeles. Their awards include the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Award, UCLA's Arts Restoring Community Grant, and the 4x4 Poetry Award selected by Eileen Myles. Their plays include 11:38 From Fond Du Lac (Kennedy Center Steinberg Award, New Harmony Project ), Bite History (The Elysian Theater) and more. Their pilots and short films have been Official Chelsea Film Festival Selections, NYSF Filmmaker Lab finalists, and Austin Film Festival finalists.
They've worked as a director's assistant, showrunner's assistant, and associate producer. Their best gig to date was as a basketball technical advisor on Abbott Elementary. They write and direct short plays as Public Assembly company member, while producing and hosting KAP’S FUNNIEST FRIENDS, a monthly variety show at LA's Elysian Theater. BA Columbia University. MFA Playwriting UCLA.
