Winner: Meg Miroshnik
The Fairy Tale Lives of Russian Girls
Meg Miroshnik's work features a heightened attention to language and an emphasis on complicated central roles for women. Her plays include The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, The Droll, The Tall Girls, Lady Tattoo, and an adaptation of the libretto for Shostakovich’s Moscow, Cheryomushki. She is the recipient of a 2012 Whiting Award.
Her work has been produced and developed by La Jolla Playhouse, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Center Theatre Group, South Coast Rep, the McCarter Theatre Center, Alliance Theatre, Yale Rep, the Kennedy Center, Lark New Play Development Center, Chicago Opera Theater, the Moscow Playwright and Director Center, Washington Ensemble Theatre, Circle X, The Wilma Theater, Undermain Theatre, Perishable Theatre, WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory, One Coast Collaboration, and published by Samuel French. The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls was a finalist for the 2012 Susan Smith Blackburn prize and winner of the 2011-2012 Alliance/Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Award.
Meg hails from Minneapolis and currently lives in Los Angeles. She is a founding member The Kilroys, a band of playwrights and producers committed to gender equity in the American theater. www.thekilroys.org | www.megmiroshnik.com
Bob Bartlett
Whales
Bob Bartlett teaches playwriting, screenwriting, and dramatic literature and theory in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Bowie State University. His plays include A Home By The Sea; The Escort; Sighted, a futuristic retelling of HG Wells' short story The Country of the Blind; LÝKOS ÁNTHRŌPOS, an exploration of lycanthropy recently produced in the woods of Central Maryland; Union, a new play about Walt Whitman's years living and loving in Washington, DC, during the Civil War; The Regular (2022 O'Neill Finalist; 2020 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference); E2, an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II which recently premiered at Maryland's Rep Stage; The Orbit of Mercury (2017 O'Neill Finalist); Swimming with Whales (1st Stage - six 2019 Helen Hayes Award nominations); Happiness (and Other Reasons to Die) (The Welders); The Accident Bear (The Avenue Laundromat); Falwell (Active Cultures); Kuchu Uganda (DC Queer Theatre Festival); Kansas (First Draft); and Finding Fauci (Transformation Theatre). His play Bareback Ink, a queer reimaging of the Ganymede myth, recently had a run at NYC's Hard Sparks, directed by Obie-winner David Drake. Recently, Bartlett has been producing his own site-specific work: his play The Accident Bear had a successful run in the Avenue Laundromat in Downtown Annapolis; during the first year of covid, he staged his play Three Strangers Sitting Around a Backyard Firepit at Two in the Morning Listening to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska in his backyard; he recently staged his horror play, LÝKOS ÁNTHRŌPOS, in a wooded clearing in central Maryland; his romcom Love and Vinyl will run throughout the summer of 2023 at KA-CHUNK!! Records in downtown Annapolis; and he wrote the covid-inspired, twelve-episode Duck Harbor with EM Lewis for 1st Stage in Tysons which aired in 2021. Bartlett won the 2021 USM Board of Regents Faculty Award in Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity, and is recent past chair of The National Playwriting Program (NPP) of KCACTF (Region 2), a two-time recipient of the Individual Artists Award in Playwriting from the Maryland State Arts Council, an affiliated artist with the National New Play Network, and a member of The Dramatists Guild of America. He is a founding member of The Welders, a DC-based, producing playwrights collective who were recognized with the 2016 John Aniello Award for Emerging Theater Company by theatreWashington's Helen Hayes Awards. Education: MFA in Playwriting, Catholic University of America; MA in English - Language and Literature, Bowie State University
Timothy Guillot
We Fight We Die
Timothy Guillot is a playwright and composer from Washington, DC via New York. His plays, musicals, and original compositions have been read and performed in the US, Europe, and South Korea. His work has been read and performed at Center Theatre Group, Alliance Theatre, The Lark Playwrights' Center, Imagination Stage, Yale Cabaret, Forum Theatre, the Mead Theatre Lab, Source Festival, Capital Fringe Festival, and many others. He is the 2016 winner of the Dramatic Writing Prize from the Adirondack Shakespeare Company, the 2011 recipient of the KCACTF Musical Theatre Award, a finalist for the Alliance/Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition, the Larry Neal Writers' Awards, the nuVoices Festival, and a semifinalist for the O'Neill (twice), and Blue Ink. At Imagination Stage, Tim's work as a composer on TVY plays Mouse on the Move, Inside Out, and Blue has been remounted over 20 times at Imagination Stage, and seen additional productions in Oregon, Oklahoma, New York, and Florida. In 2017, Inside Out was performed at the ASSITEJ festival in South Korea, becoming the first American company to present in the festival's history. Tim is also a commissioned artist at Imagination Stage, where he co-wrote the new musical adaptation of Dickens' Davy Copperfield with Janet Stanford, which received its world premiere in February of 2019. Tim lives in Alexandria, VA.
Alexander Maggio
Lost Cause
Alex Maggio is a TV writer working to shift the climate narrative. He got his start as a Writers' Assistant on the third season of Homeland, then joined the staff for all six seasons of Madam Secretary, where he was responsible for writing and producing multiple episodes that highlighted the climate refugee crisis. He most recently served as a Co-Executive Producer for the CBS drama series FBI. Behind the scenes, he works as an advisor to Good Energy – a nonprofit story consultancy dedicated to portraying the climate emergency on screen -- and helped develop "A Playbook For Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change."
Ben Snyder
Shoe Story
Ben Snyder is a television producer, filmmaker, and playwright. He wrote for the Netflix series Grand Army and produced the HBO series Betty. Ben has developed television for BET, Channel 4, Lionsgate Entertainment, and Warner Bros. His most recent feature film, Allswell, with Bobby Cannavale and Max Casella won the Best Screenplay Award at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. His previous film, 11:55, with Julia Stiles and John Leguizamo, is streaming on Showtime. Ben was the story consultant for the Sundance award-winning documentary The Wolfpack. His plays have been produced at P.S. 122, The Vineyard Theater, Crossroads Theatre, The Apollo Theater, New York Stage and Film, and at HBO's U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. Ben's plays have been nominated for NAACP Image Awards and published in the anthology, "Say Word! Voices from Hip Hop Theater," Michigan Press. He is a member of Labyrinth Theater Company and teaches at Brooklyn College.
