Writers Revealed

Wendy Graf

Wendy Graf is an award-winning playwright whose plays have been produced nationally and internationally. Some recent plays include: EXIT WOUNDS (First Place Gold Medallion Winner Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle New Play Initiative); UNEMPLOYED ELEPHANTS – A LOVE STORY; PLEASE DON’T ASK ABOUT BECKET; ALL AMERICAN GIRL (Stage Raw 2015 nom Playwriting and Solo performance; StageSceneLA 2015 Outstanding Solo Performance Production;); CLOSELY RELATED KEYS (dir by Shirley Jo Finney; NAACP win/nominations); NO WORD IN GUYANESE FOR ME (2012 GLAAD Award Outstanding L.A. Theater; Helen Hayes Awards Recommended); BEHIND THE GATES; LESSONS (L.A. production dir by Gordon Davidson); LEIPZIG (LADCC nomination; Garland award/Playwriting); THE BOOK OF ESTHER (San Fernando Valley Artistic Directors nominations including Best Play; ASK Theater Projects Grant Award); and her newest, A SHONDA and WEDNESDAY’S CHILD. Graf recently worked with Lower Depth in their BIPOC Voting Plays with her play, THE CROSS AND THE SABER.

Visit her at wendygraf.com

Zola Dee

Los Angeles based Zola Dee is an emerging theatre artist and arts activist from North Carolina. Her most notable work GUNSHOT MEDLEY: Part 1 was Ovation Award recommended and published in Routledge’s Contemporary Plays by Women of Color. Other accomplishments include: 2017-2018 Core Apprentice at The Playwright's Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota & 2018 Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights Diversity Fellow. 

Zola is a graduate of California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in Acting and a minor in Creative Writing. Currently, she serves as the Artistic Associate at The Pasadena Playhouse, The State Theater of California where she assists in curating all artistic programming, event producing, and community engagement efforts within the Pasadena and greater San Gabriel Valley area. 

For more information, visit www.zoladee.com

DeLane McDuffie

DeLane McDuffie is a LA-based writer, cinephile, jazz head, and bookworm. A Southern transplant from the Carolina marshlands, he’s a screenwriter, playwright, and poet. He graduated from Morehouse College with BA in English; attended Royal Holloway, University of London; and earned an MFA in film from the University of Miami. His most recent original plays have been produced or slated for production in Los Angeles, Houston, and Seoul, South Korea.

Find him at delanemcduffie.com.

Steve Harper

STEVE HARPER is a TV writer, playwright and actor. Recent work: A Few Short Plays to Save the World at Northwestern University, and Three People for #WhileWeBreathe (creative protest online). His play The Political Machine was read as part of Lower Depth’s BIPOC Voting Plays. He collaborated on Black Lives / Blue Lives (with Bill Mesce Jr.) at The Theater Project (NJ). TV writing includes Stargirl (CW), God Friended Me (CBS) and American Crime (ABC). His web series SEND ME garnered a 2016 Emmy Nomination. (YouTube). Graduate of Yale, The A.R.T. Institute at Harvard and the Juilliard playwriting program.

Kermit Frazier

Kermit Frazier’s more than twenty-five plays have been produced around the country at such theaters as the New Federal Theater, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Detroit Repertory Theater, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Seattle Children’s Theatre, and Baltimore Center Stage. Some have also been published by Broadway Play Publishing and Dramatic Publishing. In addition, he’s written for several television series, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such publications as Callaloo, Essence, Black World, The Missouri Review, American Theatre, and The New York Times Book Review. His work as a playwright was spotlighted in June, 2020, in a full-page New York Times feature article.

Paula Cizmar

PAULA CIZMAR is an award-winning playwright/librettist. Plays include: Antigone X (California Rep) and The Vig (Inglewood-90303), an audio play that premieres in May 2021 as part of Antaeus Theatre Company’s Zip Code Plays series. She is one of the writers of the site-specific Hotel Play (Playwrights Arena) and Seven (LA Theatre Works, plus 30+ productions in 22 languages). She wrote the libretto for Invisible (LA Opera Eurydice Found Festival) and Firecrackers (commissioned by White Snake Opera), music composed by Guang Yang; Cizmar & Yang also won the Pittsburgh Festival Opera Music That Matters competition for Minerva’s Owl.

www.paulacizmar.net

June Carryl

June Carryl grew up in Denver and studied Political Science and English Literature at Brown University. Her plays include CONSORTIUM (Lower Depth Theatre’s BIPOC Voting Plays), TOW (Coeurage Theatre’s NOMAD PROJECT), THE LIFE AND DEATH OF (Vagrancy Theatre), COLOSSUS (Semi-Finalist, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference) BOOM (Semi-Finalist O’Neill National Playwrights Conference), and THE GOOD MINISTER FROM HARARE (Playwrights Arena Summer Series, Saroyan/Paul Award). Recent directing credits include ROAD HOME (Sky Pilot Theatre), and WHEN WE BREATHE (Blossoming Festival, Vagrancy Theatre). Favorite roles include Fraulein Schneider in CABARET (Celebration Theatre) and Gerty Fail in FAILURE: A LOVE STORY (Coeurage Theatre).

Tira Palmquist

TIRA PALMQUIST is known for plays that merge the personal, the political and the poetic. Her most produced play, Two Degrees, premiered at the Denver Center, and was subsequently produced by Tesseract Theater in St. Louis and Prime Productions at the Guthrie (among others). Her play The Way North was a Finalist for the O’Neill, an Honorable Mention for the 2019 Kilroys List, and was featured in the 2019 Ashland New Plays Festival. 

Tira’s current projects include The Body’s Midnight, a play she worked on as the Travis Bogard Artist in Residence at the Tao House (Eugene O’Neill Foundation) and King Margaret, an adaptation of the Henry VI, which will have a reading at OSF in July 2021.

The Way North, which was developed at the 2018 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, was a finalist for the 2018 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the 2018 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the 2019 Blue Ink Playwriting Award. The Way North was also featured in the following festivals: The Festival of New American Plays (Phoenix Theater), the Human Rights New Works Festival (Red Mountain Theater), the Page-by-Page Festival (Pioneer Theater) and the Road Theater’s Summer New Works Festival. 

Among Tira’s commission projects are The Worth of Water (Clutch Productions’ equity showcase production in NYC in October, directed by Mélisa Annis) and Lower Depth Theater Ensemble’s commission Safe Harbor, a play about sex trafficking, which premiered in November in LA. Tira has also been commissioned to write new work for the UCI graduate acting students. Her play Hold Steady was workshopped at UCI in February 2019, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything  was workshopped in February 2020, and in February 2021, The Last Time We Saw Madison was performed online with the more recent first-year grad actors.

Her other plays include Ten Mile Lake (Serenbe Playhouse), Age of Bees (NYU Stella Adler Studio, MadLab Theater, Tesseract), And Then They Fell (MadLab, Brimmer Street, New York Film Academy) and This Floating World.

Two Degrees has been featured in numerous festivals (including the 11th Annual Denver Center New Play Summit, the New American Voices festival in the UK, the Caltech 2014 Mach 33 Festival and the 2014 Great Plains Theater Conference) and had its World Premiere in the Denver Center’s 2016/17 Season. Two Degrees was also listed in the Honorable Mention list for the 2016 Kilroys. Ten Mile Lake, which premiered in 2014 at Serenbe Playhouse just outside of Atlanta, GA, was developed and workshopped in 2012 at the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, and was a finalist for the 2015 Primus Prize. 

Tira has taught creative writing at the Orange County School of the Arts, at Wesleyan University and at the University of California-Irvine. She is a member of the Playwrights Union, the Anteaus Theater’s Playwrights Lab and is a member of the Dramatists Guild. Her work as a director and dramaturg includes several seasons at the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, MadLab Theater’s Young Playwrights’ Program, Moving Arts Theater’s MADLAB series and the New Territories Playwriting Residency. More info at www.tirapalmquist.com. 

Joy Gregory

Joy Gregory is a founding member of Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company, which shall return for its 32nd season, praise be. Joy is a playwright and writer/producer for series television. Previous plays include The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World at Playwrights Horizons and an adaptation of Studs Terkel’s Race: How Blacks and Whites Think & Feel About the American Obsession, with Lookingglass. Joy’s series writing credits include Madam Secretary, Joan of Arcadia, Switched At Birth, Felicity and Jericho. Her newest play, The Lonely Ape, was a semifinalist in this year’s National Playwrights Conference.

t.tara turk-haynes

t.tara turk-haynes is a writer whose work has been featured in various stages and screens including Lower Depth Theatre, Rogue Machine, Company of Angels, the Hip Hop Theater Festival, the Actor's Studio, Ensemble Studio Theater, the Schomburg, and the Kennedy Center.  She is a graduate of Lang College and Sarah Lawrence, receiving the Lipkin Playwrighting Award. She has been a Cycle of Violence Fellow at Lower Depth Ensemble, Van Lier Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop,  a member of Cosby Screenwriting Program, the Producers Guild Diversity Workshop, the Underwood Theatre Writers Group with Julia Cho, Rinne Groff, and Theresa Rebeck, and Company of Angels Writers Group. Her screenplays range from shorts to full length.  She won Best Screenplay at African American Women in Cinema and was an Urbanworld Screenplay Finalist. Also a producer, she has co-produced the webseries “Dinner at Lola” featuring Tracie Thoms, Yvette Nicole Brown, Bryan Fuller and Nelson Ellis among others.  As a fiction writer, her shorts and novellas have been published in various publications. She was published in Signifyin Harlem, Obsidian Call & Response: Experiments in Joy, Reverie: Midwest American Literature, the international anthology “X:24”, African Voices and Stress magazine. She has just finished a novel and a TV pilot on the Harlem Renaissance. She is a founding member of the producing playwrights’ collective The Temblors and a member of the 2021 Geffen Writer’s Room.

Peppur Chambers

PEPPUR CHAMBERS is an international writer/producer/educator. A member of Moving Arts MADLab, Circle X Emerging Playwrights Group, and Antaeus Playwrights Lab, she uses her voice to amplify women’s issues, social justice and love. Next up: The Fire In-Between, a radio play about LA’s 1933 Griffith Park fire for Antaeus Theatre Company’s The Zip Code Plays Season Three. Her plays For the Love of You (LDTE!), House Rules, The Build UP, Dick & Jayne Get a Life and one-woman show, Harlem’s Awakening: Storytelling Live have been produced in LA and Prague. Learn more at penandpeppur.com where she tells stories of heroes, including her own.

Diana Burbano

Diana Burbano is a Colombian immigrant, a playwright, an Equity actor, and a teaching artist at Breath of Fire Latina Theatre Ensemble and South Coast Repertory. She is in the Geffen’s Writers Lab in 20-21. She has worked on projects with South Coast Repertory, Artists Repertory Theatre, Breath of Fire Latina Theatre Ensemble and Center Theatre Group and Livermore Shakespeare Festival. She is the current Dramatists Guild Rep for Southern California. www.dianaburbano.com

Penelope Lowder

Penelope Lowder is a playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Her play WEST ADAMS was selected as an LA Times Critic’s Choice for its production at Skylight Theatre 2020. Some of her many works include, Reaching Autonomy, performed at Company of Angels’ Page to the Stage series. She partnered with Black Women State of The Union , who produced her plays “15 Minutes” and “The Follicle Prison War”, at Skylight Theater. The latter was also selected for the NAACP Ten-Minute Play Festival. The Short Playwriting Festival in New York selected "Honest Sam" about an African war criminal that finally receives his comeuppance as a semi finalist. Her other works that have been performed in Los Angeles are “Show Me To Shonda” at the Leimert Park Theatre Festival, “The Third Day” at Alimento and staged reading of her science fiction work, “A Drop of Sun”. Her short play, “Water”, was produced by Skylight Live and she was a writer on the Skylight serial Benton Way. She was commissioned by Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble to write a ten-minute work in regards to voting in America, entitled, “Unit Hope Just Wants to Vote.”

In 2019 Lowder’s short film, “15 Minutes”, premiered in many festivals winning an IndieFest Award, Best Shorts Award as well as entry into 2020 Pan African Film Festival. Her debut novel, Three Seconds of Hell, the story of her father's experiences in a 1950’s southern motorcycle gang was published in 2017.

She is currently a participant in the CTG L.A. Writers’ Workshop and a member of Skylight Playwrights Lab, SkyLAB. She is a recipient of the Marvin Miller Screenwriting Fellowship, Los Angeles Theater Center Playwrights Residency, Audrey Skirball Kenis Playwrights Lab.

Lowder holds a Bachelor's degree in Theater from the University of Southern California and she resides in Los Angeles.

Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay

Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay is a Lao writer. CNN’s “United Shades of America” host W. Kamau Bell called her work “revolutionary.” She’s the author of the children’s book WHEN EVERYTHING WAS EVERYTHING and is best known for her award-winning play KUNG FU ZOMBIES VS CANNIBALS. Her plays have been presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center (NY), Theater Mu (MN), Asian Improv Arts (IL), Lower Depth Theater (LA), and elsewhere. Saymoukda is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Theater Mu, a McKnight Foundation Fellow in Community-Engaged Practice Art, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in playwriting. www.refugenius.net

DeLanna Studi

DeLanna Studi (Cherokee) is an actor/playwright whose TV credits include “Dreamkeeper”, “Edge of America”, “Shameless”, “General Hospital”, Z Nation, and “Goliath”. Her theater credits include the First National Broadway Tour of “August: Osage County”, Off-Broadway’s “Informed Consent” and Gloria: A Life”. She retraced her family’s footsteps along the Trail of Tears with her father and wrote her play “And So We Walked”. She has created plays for Theatre for One, The Theatre Center, and Period Piece. She is the Chair of SAG-AFTRA’s National Native Americans Committee, and the Artistic Director of Native Voices at the Autry.

Instagram: @DeLannaStudi

Jason Grasl

Jason Grasl is an actor, playwright, and director. He is an ensemble member at Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles. He has written several full-length plays including Lying With Badgers, for which the world-premiere production at Native Voices was cut short due to Covid-19. Last year, his short play The Wheels on the Bus Come Off was featured in Lower Depth Theatre’s Pandemic Short Play Festival. His newest play, The Normal Force, a sci-fi drama, was commissioned by San Diego Rep for their Here U.S. Now Festival.