CRISTINA ANGELES (co-curator, director Castillos de Plástico) is an Afrolatina director, writer, and theater maker who develops new plays, musicals, and socially conscious adaptations of classics that place women of color at the forefront, while confronting the intersections between our public, private, and political selves. She has been awarded the Drama League Directing Fellowship, the Roundabout Directing Fellowship, and has worked as an associate director on and off Broadway. Today, Cristina is the Associate Resident Director at Roundabout Theatre Company, and the Founding Artistic Director of  Checkmark Productions, a NYC based company dedicated to artists of the global majority and the telling of their stories. Cristina was named one of the Broadway Women’s Fund’s “Women to Watch” of 2022, and her recent directing credits include Hilary Bettis’s Queen of Basel at Theaterworks Hartford, and overseeing the North American productions of SIX: The Musical. More at  www.cristinaangeles.com 

KARINA BILLINI (short play commissioned writer) is a Dominican-American playwright and educator from Brooklyn, New York. Billini is a second-year playwright in the Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace American playwriting program. She is a current member of the Public Theater’s 2023-2025 Emerging Writers Group. She is a proud alum of the New Harmony Project Conference, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood, Pipeline PlayLab, Gingold Theatrical Group’s Speaker’s Corner, among others.  Her plays have been workshopped and/or produced at La Jolla Playhouse, Alliance Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, New Harmony Project, Fault Line Theatre, Teatro Vivo, among others. Her play, Apple Bottom, is a recipient of the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation commission.  MFA: The New School for Drama, BA: Marymount Manhattan College. 

PATRICE JOHNSON CHEVANNES (co-curator, director of Not About Eve) is an award-winning, Brooklyn-based actress, writer, filmmaker, director, and the executive producer of God-and-all-o-wee Productions and Ubigwitus Records. Her acting credits include Broadway, Off-Broadway, Regional theaters, TV and Film. Patrice has collaborated with Sir Richard Eyre and Academy Award nominated actors Liam Nelson and Laura Linney on The Crucible (Broadway) and with Sir Patrick Stewart opposite whom she played Desdemona in Othello (The Shakespeare Theater).  Patrice was honored to work with Sir Michael Boyd on Tamburlaine I & II, Sir Trevor Nunn, Pericles and Karin Coonrod, Coriolanus at TFANA. In 2023, she was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for her work in Endgame at the Irish Repertory Theater in New York. Patrice also garnered 2020 Drama Desk and Drama League nominations for her work in Mfoniso Udofia’s runboyrun/In Old Age (NYTW), and an Audelco nomination for her role in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Halfway Bitches Go Straight To Heaven (Atlantic Theater Company). Patrice won an Audelco Award for For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf (directed by Ntozake Shange). Her television credits include “Pose”, “Shrill”, “Evil”, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, “The First Lady” and “The Good Fight”. Patrice has written and directed three independent films: Kings County, NY’s Dirty Laundry and Hill and Gully. She is on the faculty of The New School where she teaches acting in The School of Drama. Patrice also teaches public speaking to the Obama Foundation Scholars at Columbia University in the City of New York. 

LA DANIELLA (playwright, Castillos de Plástico) is an AfroDominican/Nuyorican playwright, actor/performer, puppeteer and teaching artist from Bushwick, Brooklyn, where her family has lived for 60 years, making satirical fabulist theater that centers queer Black/Latine women and working class communities. As a playwright, her work has been supported by The Public Theater, Bushwick Starr, New York Theater Workshop, The New Group, Checkmark Productions, United Solo Festival, Barrington Stage Company and San Diego Repertory Theater. Her play Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back (FKA Columbus Play)  won the 2020 Burman New Play Award and was a finalist for the 2022 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She’s an alum of The Public Theater’s 2018-19 Emerging Writers Group, a staff writer on the upcoming narrative podcast FLIPPED! (produced by echoverse and Neal Baer) and acts as a story consultant on the upcoming one-man show, The Illio Snow Story  (written and performed by rapper Civil). As an actress, she is best known for her role as Zirconia on Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black”, for which she shares a nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series by the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Lately, La Daniella has been experimenting with puppetry and burlesque as Gooey Pudín and Scabby da Rat, while she works retail on the weekends and teaches playwriting at the Harbor School with Big Green Theater/ SuperHero Clubhouse. She is a graduate of Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program and NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Drama.  

NEHASSAIU DEGANNES (short play commissioned writer). Born in Trinidad to Grenadian and Guyanese parents, and Dominican and Vincentian grandparents, with extended family hailing from or having now arrived in St Lucia, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Antigua, Tortola, the U.S., England and Canada, Nehassaiu deGannes (she/her/hers) is truly a daughter of the Caribbean Diaspora. A multi-hyphenate actor, poet, playwright, fluent in classical, contemporary, research-driven and newly devised experimental works, Nehassaiu has appeared as an actor Off B’way, regionally and internationally, originating roles in several world-premieres, including The High Ground by Nathan Alan Davis (Arena Stage), Incendiary by Dave Harris (Woolly Mammoth,) and Is God Is by Aleshea Harris (Soho Rep.) In her original plays and solo-shows, Nehassaiu deploys assemblage to awaken repositories of myth and memory, dredge resilience from traumatic dispersals and create radical envisionings of joyous belonging. Her plays have been produced by Digital Dionysus, Shakespeare & Co., Syracuse University Center for Folk Art, CUNY Staten Island, All Children’s Theatre, Rites and Reason Theatre, Providence Black Rep, and her one-act, The Frangipani Door, received Perishable Theatre’s Women’s Playwrighting Award. She has twice served as featured performer for The UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women, toured nationally with Cynthia Oliver COCo Dance Theater’s evocative exploration of women and calypso, Rigidigidim De Bambe De, and received a 2020 Assembly Deceleration Lab Grant to seed development of EBB & lo’, an exhumation of the oft forgotten Caribbean creole background of world renown love poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Nehassaiu’s own book of poems, Music for Exile (Tupelo Press 2021,) was awarded the NEPC Sheila Margaret Motton Prize. Currently at The Shaw Festival in the Canadian premiere of Marcus Gardley’s The House That Will Not Stand and a brand-new Sherlock Holmes mystery, Nehassaiu lives in Brooklyn on the unceded lands of the Munsee-Lenape. (nehassaiu.com / IG @nehassaiu) 

NELSON DIAZ-MARCANO (playwright, 1898) is a Puerto Rican NYC-based theater maker, advocate, and community leader whose mission is to create work that challenges and builds community. He currently serves as the Literary Director for the Latinx Playwright Circle where he has helped develop over 100 plays in the past four years. His plays have been developed by Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Road Theatre Company, Pipeline Theatre Company, Clubbed Thumb, The Lark, Vision Latino Theater Company, The Orchard Project, The William Inge Theatre Festival, Classical Theatre of Harlem, and The Parsnip Ship among others. Select credits include: Las Borinqueñas (Ensemble Studio Theatre), World Classic (Bishop Theatre Arts Center, Pa’Lante Theater), Y Tu Abuela, Where is She? Part 1 (CLATA), The Diplomats (Random Acts Chicago), Paper Towels (INTAR), Misfit, America (Pa’Lante Theater) and Revolt! (Vision Latino Theatre Company). 

ESTEFANÍA FADUL (Director, 1898) is a Colombian-American NYC-based stage director, and Co-Artistic Director of Ensemble Studio Theatre with Graeme Gillis. Directing includes the world premieres of Hotel Happy  by Camilo Almonacid (Houses on the Moon); Caridad Svich’s Eva Luna, based on the novel by Isabel Allende (Repertorio Español); The Garbologists  by Lindsay Joelle (Philadelphia Theatre Company); The Same Day  by Stefan Ivanov (Theatre Laboratory Sfumato, Bulgaria); Scissoring by C. Quintana (INTAR); and the Drama League Award-nominated Carla’s Quince, devised with the Voting Project Ensemble to mobilize Latiné voters to the polls. She serves on the Drama League’s Board of Directors and the Latinx Theatre Commons advisory committee, and is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, New Georges, and SDC. B.A. Vassar College. www.estefaniafadul.com. 

NADIA GUEVARA (director, short plays). Recent credits: The Survival (National Queer Theatre/PACNYC, Cell (Keen Theatre/Drama League), Cinderella: A Salsa Fairy Tale (Imagination Stage – Helen Hayes Recommended), Water by the Spoonful (Texas Tech University), Spring Awakening, Fefu and Her Friends (American University), “N” (Keegan Theatre), Palabras de encanto: Tales of Borikén (Academy of Classical Acting at George Washington University), Little Women (Johns Hopkins University), Guadalupe in the Guest Room, Cinderella Eats Rice and Beans: A Salsa Fairy Tale (NVA), El encuentro (Old Globe).  Readings: The Invisible Hand of God Touched Me in a Bad Place (Latinx Playwrights Circle), The Beast of Hungary (Red Bull Theatre), Short New Play Festival (Red Bull Theatre), L’HÔTEL (Fulton Theatre), Azul (San Diego Rep/LNFP). Associate/Assistant/Tour Director: The Poisoner (La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club/Uncommon Productions), A Wrinkle in Time (New York Stage and Film), Acoustic Rooster, Show Way (The Kennedy Center), Knight of the Burning Pestle (Red Bull), The Wolves (McCarter Theatre Center), The Odyssey (Dallas Theatre Center/Dallas Public Works), Daphne’s Dive (Signature Theatre), Put Your House in Order (La Jolla Playhouse). Upcoming: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Univ. of Rochester), Reading Room Festival (Folger Shakespeare Library). Proud recipient of the 2022-2044 Drama League Stage Directing Fellowship. Winner, 2018 Actor of the Year, San Diego Critics Circle www.nadiaguevara.com IG: @nadiaguevaradc 

FEDNA JACQUET (playwright, Black Mother Lost Daughter). Full-time actor/writer/director Fedna Jacquet was born in Boston to Haitian parents. She recently starred as Passenger 1 in the Tony nominated Ain’t No Mo on Broadway. She is a 2023/2024 Primary Stages fellow (DSNAWG), a CRNY Artist, and the 2020-2024 National Black Theatre Playwright in Residence. Fedna was a 2021-2022 Inaugural Still I Rise Documentary Fellow, a 2019-2022 Huntington Theatre Playwriting Fellow, and a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Playwriting/Screenwriting. Written work for the screen includes Isaiah (ABFF/TVOne Screenplay Competition Finalist), Homebase (Juilliard/NYU Showcase), Inheritance (Tribeca/Chanel Through Her Lens Finalist, Urbanworld Film Festival Featured Screenplay), Circus (2020 HollyShorts Quarterfinalist) and Going Home. She has written two pilots: “Model Minority” (a half hour dramedy centered around an Asian American male lead) and “Pefeksyon” (a half hour comedy centered around a Haitian American family). Written plays include Black Mother Lost Daughter (National Black Theatre, Breaking Ground Festival, O’Neill Finalist), Pefeksyon (Playwright’s Realm Finalist, DVRF Finalist, Studio Tisch), Inheritance (Classical Theatre of Harlem Playwright’s Playground, Studio Tisch), Civic Duty (Commissioned by Suny Purchase), Girlfriend (The Fire This Time Festival, O’Neill Semifinalist) and Heroes (Developed as a Huntington Fellow). Fedna is currently recurring on “FBI: Most Wanted” (CBS). BA: Brown University. MFA: NYU/Tisch Grad Acting. Her short film Chante Maman Mwen (My Mother’s Song) premiered at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival and screened at HBO sponsored Urbanworld Film Festival among many others. Her short film Murika premiered at the Brooklyn Film Festival. 

JULIETTE JEFFERS (short play commissioned writer) is an award winning Caribbean American actor, playwright, director, producer and teaching artist. On screen, she has appeared in twenty-two films, forty-one TV shows and over sixty national commercials. Some of her recent credits include “Found”, “Law & Order: Organized Crime”, “911 Lone Star” and “Chicago Med”. You can see Juliette currently in “Aftermath” on Netflix and “Noise in The Middle” on Amazon Prime. And stay tuned for her upcoming Guest Star Recurring roles in Shondaland’s “The Residence” on Netflix starring Giancarlo Esposito and “Tulsa King” on Paramount Plus, starring Sylvester Stallone. Juliette has produced several theatre productions in NY and LA. She has written and performed five solo plays and performed them throughout the US and the Caribbean: Batman and Robin in the Boogie Down, (Bronx Council on the Arts Award, Drama Desk, and NAACP nominations), Chocolate Match, Pan Gyul, Judgment Day, and Tio Pablo (In English and Spanish – best play and best actress awards – Hollywood Short and Sweet fest). As a teaching artist, Juliette has taught acting and writing in schools and correctional facilities in N.Y. and L.A. She is a private coach and has helped develop and/or directed over eighty solo shows. She also teaches Master Classes throughout the country. Juliette served on the Board of the LA Women’s Theatre Festival and was the Curator of the Black Voices Solo Theatre Festival at the Whitefire Theatre. Juliette is currently working with the Nevis government to help build their Film Industry. For more information, please visit www.juliettejeffers.com and you can follow her on social media @juliettejeffers 

ERLINA ORTIZ (short play writer) is a Dominican-American playwright and theatre maker from Reading, PA. Her heartfelt and humorous plays have been presented across the US and with Power Street Theatre where she is proud to be Resident Playwright and Co-Artistic Director. In 2018, her play Las Mujeres received The Bonaly Award for Creation of Community Joy and in 2019 Morir Sonyando was nominated for six Barrymore Awards including Outstanding New Play. In Fall 2021 Young Money premiered at Azuka Theatre and went on to receive the ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award Citation. In 2022 her play La Egoista was selected for the LTC Comedy Carnaval in Denver going on to win the 2022 National Latine Playwriting Award, premiering at Actors Theatre of Louisville and Skylight Theatre and being featured on the 2023 Kilroy’s WEB. It will have its Philadelphia premiere at Philadelphia Theatre Company in October 2024. Her new musical, Siluetas, was developed for the O’Neill National Musical Theatre Conference and premiered with Power Street Theatre in June 2024 where it went on to be nominated for 7 Barrymore Awards including Outstanding Original Production. Erlina has embarked on the Amtrak Writer’s residency where she traveled across the US in an Amtrak sleeper car, the Signal Fire Residency Outpost Residency where she lived on the side of a mountain for a week, and in 2019 she gave the Keynote Address at the Delaware Writer’s Conference on the importance of nurturing your artistic community. She was a member of NEXUS with New York Stage and Film and is a two-time recipient of the Leeway Art and Change Grant and the 2021 Leeway Transformation Award. In 2023, she was named as a Dramatist Guild Foundation Catalyst Fellow. Erlina has taught playwriting with the University of the Arts, Power Street Theatre, and Blue Stoop. She currently serves as secretary of the board for Theatre Philadelphia. Erlina believes being an artist is a superpower, she believes in using her powers for good.
erlinaortiz.com - @erlina6ortiz 

PHANÉSIA PHAREL (short play commissioned writer) is a Haitian-American playwright from a Dragon Fruit farm in Miami. Daughter of an immigrant teacher and farmer, she writes to honor people. Full lengths: The Waterfall (Workshop, Old Globe Theatre/Thrown Stone, EST Bloodworks reading, Kennedy Center Lorraine Hansberry award), R&B (Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist/Honorable Mention, Playwrights Realm Finalist), Lucky (New York Stage and Film, Kennedy Center Latinx Playwriting Award, Kennedy Center Rosa Parks Playwriting Award). Black Girl Joy (Kilroys 2023, Bay Area Playwrights Festival Finalist/Honorable Mention, Jane Chambers Finalist, Frank Moffett Mosier Fellowship for Works in Heightened Finalist Prize). Other Honors include New Harmony 2023 Finalist and City Theatre National Short Playwriting Finalist. Phanésia is a member of the Obie award-winning EST/Youngblood group. Commissions include City Theatre Miami, the Latinx Playwrights Circle & Pregones/PRTT Greater Good Commission and Thrown Stone Theatre. Her work has been developed with the Old Globe, New York Stage and Film, Shattered Globe, Echo Theater Company of Los Angeles, and the Playwrights Center. Publishing: Concord Theatricals, Smith and Kraus Best Plays of 2020, Reset Coalition 2020 Anthology and the City Theatre Anthology. BA: Urban Studies, Barnard College of Columbia University. MFA: Playwriting, University of California @ San Diego 25 

IRAISA ANN REILLY (playwright, The Jersey Devil is a Papi Chulo) is a writer, actor and educator who is half-Cuban, half-Irish and whole New Jersey.  She writes bilingual plays that reflect the communities and spiritual realities that she calls home. Her work has been developed and recognized by Teatro del Sol, La Jolla Playhouse, Two River Theatre, Lucille Lortel Theatre, Arkansas New Play Festival, Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, Sol Project, Theatre Exile, The New Harmony Project, Texas A&M University, Michigan State, Latinx Playwrights Circle, and the Yale Drama Series. She is currently under commission with Arden Theatre Company and ArtHouse Productions, and was recently named as a playwright in the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab. She will perform her one-woman show, January 6th: A Celebration: A Bodega Princess remembers tradition not Insurrection  this September as part of Media Luna, a festival curated by Teatro Circulo and Latinx Playwrights Circle. As a screenwriter, her work La Reina del Bronx  won Best Screenplay at Fusion Film Festival and was a semifinalist for the Vail Screenwriting Competition. Her original pilot Living With Mi Familia is a semifinalist for this year’s Conch Shell International Film Festival in October. Iraisa Ann has performed off-Broadway and regionally and teaches playwriting to students of all ages. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU and a BA in Theatre and English from the University of Notre Dame. iraisaannreilly.com 

JERRICA D. WHITE (director, Black Mother Lost Daughter)

KARL O’BRIAN WILLIAMS (Playwright, Not About Eve) is a Jamaican-born actor, creative writer, producer, director and educator. His acting career has taken him from stages in the Caribbean to those in New York, Toronto, and the United Kingdom. In 2019, he was co-writer on the short films Caribbean Queen and Winston, the latter receiving over 18 film festival selections including the Pan African Film Festival and the African American Film Festival. His play The Black That I Am was featured in HERE Arts Center Sublet Series and staged in Glasgow and Galloway for the National Theatre of Scotland, and at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival. It also received The Jamaican Actor Boy Awards for Best Jamaican Play, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director and Best Drama. Not About Eve received 3 AUDELCO nominations for Excellence in Black Theatre including Outstanding Ensemble Cast, Best Dramatic Production, and Best Playwright, and won him another Actor Boy Award for Best Jamaican Play. The Boys on the Hill was a selection in The Culture Project’s 2015 Summer Play Reading series at the Lynn Redgrave Theatre, and for Long Island University’s Kumble Theatre 2016 Pride Month Celebrations. The play is now being developed along with another one-act called Gully Queen as part of a trilogy on LGBTQ+ lives in Jamaica. Excerpts of his play What’s In A Name are in “Out & Allied Volume 2: An Anthology of Performance Pieces” by LGBTQ Youth & Allies. He has produced work for the Jamaica Performing Arts Center and the Skirball Performing Arts Center. His play, The Signs of Friendship is in “We Are Not Neutral-Reset Series 2020 Short Play Collection.” He’s narrated three audiobooks, and was nominated for an Audie Award for These Ghosts Are Family written by Maisy Card. When he is not writing or acting, he is teaching theatre at Randolph College, The Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY), and in NYU’s Program in Educational Theatre. Karl is also part of the Caribbean arts nonprofit – Braata Productions! He is incredibly grateful for the opportunity to further develop the play Not About Eve. Thanks Atlantic! 

JEAN CARLO YUNÉN A. (co-producer, director The Jersey Devil is a Papi Chulo) is a director and producer originally from the Dominican Republic. He’s directed and developed work with theaters such as TheaterSquared, San Diego Rep, Repertorio Español, Keen Company & the Latino Theater Company and worked as an associate/assistant director with Atlantic Theater Company, South Coast Rep, Seattle Rep, OSF, Cincinnati Playhouse, and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. He’s a current member of Soho Rep’s 24/25 Writer-Director Lab, a former SDCF Observer (on the Sweeney Todd Broadway Revival), Van Lier Fellow, Williamstown Boris Sagal Fellow, Drama League Director’s Project Alum and an inaugural artist-in-residence for the XR2C2 in Cannes, France. He holds an MFA in directing from UCLA and BA in film from the University of Notre Dame.