About the Authors

Dan Borengasser (The Kindness of Strangers, May 31st)

Many of my plays have been produced or have received staged readings.  A number of plays – including A.R@Uni.Gov, The Canterbury Tales Revisited, and Sense & Insensibility – have been published.  My plays have been produced in theaters across the country, from New York to Los Angeles, as well as in Canada, Mexico, India, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the Philippines.  Several short screenplays have been produced as well as a feature length film I helped write, titled The Donor Conspiracy.  A number of radio plays have been produced and broadcast nationally. You can find him online at www.danborengasser.com.

Karen Marguerite Caronna (The Next to the Last Box, June 28th)

Karen Marguerite Caronna is a San Francisco Bay Area writer and actor, honored to be a Brady Fellow with 3Girls Theater. Short plays have been produced locally, including Playwright’s Center of San Francisco, Play Cafe, Women+ in Theater conference Howard, MD. She has been semi-finalist at Ground Floor, Garry Marshall theater, B street Theater New Works festivals, finalist in 46th Bay Area Playwright’s Foundation New Works Festival. A California native, Oakland is home.

Drew Katzman (In the Dream Castle, July 26th)

Drew Katzman has been writing in one form or another for more than thirty years. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild. He wrote his first play as a theater major at Syracuse University. His musical Listen to the Voices was produced by Theatre Arts Corp. in Santa Fe where he later was awarded a playwright-in- residence grant to develop a second musical, Pandora’s Circus. He has had several one-acts produced in Los Angeles, primarily at Theater West, including Magic Palace, How do You Say You Need, the critically acclaimed Tired of Looking for Barrymore and most recently The Paradigm (an Ellen Idelson Award winner) and Over the Rainbow. Not the World I Would Have Chosen, was independently produced in NY. A full-length evening comprised of two related one-acts Little Prisons, Big Escapes was also produced at Theater West.

Shayne Kennedy (The Patriarch, August 23rd)

Shayne Kennedy is a Chicago area playwright. Her play, Agreed Upon Fictions, premiered at 16th Street Theater in the fall of 2014 and enjoyed an extended, Jeff‐recommended run. Her short play, Blood Harmony, premiered at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska in 2015 and was nominated for a TAG Award for Best New Work. Handled also premiered at Creighton, in the fall of 2018 and went on to be produced at The Wildwood Theatre in Minneapolis in April of 2019. Her play Mrs. Whitman’s Words for Women won the Inkslinger Contest and was produced at Southeastern Louisiana University in April of 2022. It will have its second production in February of 2024 at Creighton University. In November of 2022, her most recent play, The Patriarch, was part of AboutFACE Theatre Company’s NEWvember festival in Dublin, Ireland. Shayne works in accessibility services for blind and low‐vision people and is the mother of three, the wife of one, a knitter and quilter. She also maintains a popular TikTok account, @shaynegoestohighschool, wherein she reads her high school diary entries, thirty‐five years to the day they were written.

Sophia Naylor (For a Brighter Tomorrow, August 9th)

Sophia Naylor’s plays include For A Brighter Tomorrow, Frankenstein: Unbound, and Blood and Dolly. Her works have been produced and/or developed by the Pear Theatre, Broad Horizons, Women Playwrights Series, Women in SOLOdarity, PCSF, MN Fringe Festival, and Local Color. Sophia co-founded the murder mystery theater company The Clue Collective; she served as CEO for six years, as well as writing shows. She’s the winner of New Voices, New Plays, New York (2023) and a finalist for the Susan Glaspell Award (2024). She earned an Honors Theater degree from Swarthmore College, specializing in playwriting, dramaturgy, acting, and Shakespeare. You can find her online at sfnaylor.com.

Mindy R. Roll (The Matchmaker, July 12th)

Mindy R. Roll is an emerging playwright who writes at the intersections of relationships, gender, spirituality, mystery, friendship, and religion. She has been a member of the Dramatists Guild of America since January 2021.

Diane H. Sampson (Don’t Just Sit There!, July 12th)

Diane is an alumna of PlayGround, the well-known playwright incubator.  Full-length plays include Naked  (a PlayGround commission) and The Greater Good, (2018 finalist in the New Works competition at Playhouse on the Square in Memphis). She has written lyrics and sometimes the music for 5 musicals, including Oh, Progeny! (two Bay Area productions), The Tale of the Sleeping Cutie  (San Francisco Production in 2014) and Unsung -The Marie Dressler Musical, (showcased at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2024). Her short plays have been performed in venues as far afield as Seattle, Miami and London. She belongs to the Dramatists Guild.

Curt Strickland (Speed Dating, July 12th)

Curt Strickland is a playwright who recently received a masters degree in playwriting from Lesley University’s graduate program. Inspired by August Wilson, Curt is finishing up his 5th play in a ten-play opus on America, each play set in a different decade. Besides his political and cultural essays, curtsview.com, Curt is a landscape photographer, and a former owner at Great American Art, one of the largest commercial art corporations in the nation. Curt believes that Art should serve to heal, inspire, provoke, challenge, and to offer hope – but most of all to connect, to remind us of our common humanity. In 2020, Curt received a double lung transplant, an event that had profound effects on both his writing and his life. This experience is the basis of a new play he is developing called Double Lung.

Laura Thoma (Heartache Tonight, July 12th)

Laura Thoma is a trauma-informed, proud “late bloomer” playwright whose work is published internationally.  As someone who has never fully seen herself represented on the stage, it is essential for her to explore and write women-centric stories of identity, intergenerational connectedness, mental health, and queerness. She is an alumn of The Outrage, The Desert Playwrights’ Retreat, the National Playwrights Symposium, Pawling Theatre Exchange (now CTE)  and the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive. Laura has developed her work with Guilford Live Arts Festival, Cape May Stage, Legacy Theatre, Chicago Dramatist, Drama Works Theatre, Chestnut Street Playhouse, Marist College, and Theatre Odyssey. Laura lives on the shoreline of Connecticut with her bookish wife, Chris, and their two dogs, Buddy Fitzwilliam and Miss Darcy.

Kathryn Zaniboni (Loving, Wendy, June 14th)

Kathryn Zaniboni is a Massachusetts native who moved to Amsterdam. The Netherlands in 2008 for love.   Prior to moving across the pond, she spent 10 glorious years in New York City working as a civil engineer by day and writing plays by night. Since then, she’s worked as a civil engineer in Amsterdam for ARCADIS, started and ran her  own NGO on Refugee Education in the Balkans, and switched careers into formal education as a Design Teacher at an international school in Amsterdam.  Kathryn’s 10-minute plays include Car Talk, What Else Should I Bring?, Can You Hear Me Now?, and The Clean Water Act, The Wait, and Proxy.  Her one-acts include What’s the Catch? and Obituary Wanted. Her work has been produced in Boston, New York and Amsterdam. She currently lives in Amsterdam with her husband and two daughters.