Winner: Madhuri Shekar
In Love and Warcraft
Madhuri Shekar is a playwright and screenwriter. Winning the 2013/14 Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting award kickstarted her theater career, starting with her first professional production of In Love and Warcraft on the Hertz Stage. Since then her plays have been produced across the country and internationally, including three world premiere commissions by the Alliance Theater - Antigone, presented by the girls of St. Catherines (2015), A Bucket of Blessings (2016 - Suzi Bass winner) and The Incredible Book Eating Boy (2022). Her other plays include Evil Eye (audio drama on Audible), House of Joy, A Nice Indian Boy (soon to be a movie starring Jonathan Groff and Karan Soni) and Queen. She got her MFA at USC, and is an alumnus of the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at Juilliard. She is currently a playwriting fellow at New Dramatists.
Film & TV work: She wrote the Amazon/Blumhouse feature Evil Eye produced by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and starring Sarita Choudhury, based on her Audible original audio drama. Her TV credits include the upcoming series adaptation of Three Body Problem for Netflix, executive produced by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Alex Woo, and Rian Johnson, and the HBO fantasy epic The Nevers. She worked on Sister Act 3 for Disney, and has multiple pilots in development. She lives in Jersey City with her husband and two adorable little boys.
Lindsey Ferrentino
Magic Man
Lindsey Ferrentino is a prolific playwright who writes with, according to The New York Times, “a muscular empathy which seeks to enter the minds of people for whom life is often a struggle of heroic proportions.” Whether writing about a female burn survivor or the first leading role for a person with Down Syndrome, Lindsey has been called, “a brave playwright of dauntless conviction whose unflinching portraits are hard to come by outside of journalism."
Her produced plays include Ugly Lies the Bone (Roundabout Theatre Company, The National Theatre, UK, NYT Critics Pick), the “barrier breaking” Amy and the Orphans (Roundabout Theatre Company), This Flat Earth (Playwrights Horizons), and The Year to Come (La Jolla Playhouse). She is currently under commission from Roundabout, Manhattan Theatre Club, and South Coast Rep. She is writing the book on a number of new musicals: The Queen of Versailles with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, starring Kristin Chenoweth; The Artist, based on the film by the same title, directed by Drew McConie. Lindsey is also a screenwriter with various projects in development. Most recently announced, she is adapting and directing her play Amy and the Orphans, produced by Aggregate Pictures and the screenplay for the film Not Fade Away, for Annapurna Pictures. David O. Russell and John Krasinski are producing.
Lindsey is the recipient of the 2016 Kesselring Prize, Laurents/Hatcher Citation of Excellence, ASCAP Cole Porter Playwriting Prize, Paul Newman Drama Award, 2015 Kilroys List, finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn, Catalyst Award for Entertainment Industry Excellence, NYU Distinguished Young Alumna Award, nominated for the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, and is the only two-time finalist for the Kendeda Playwriting Prize. She holds a B.F.A. from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and has two M.F.A.'s in playwriting from Hunter College and The Yale School of Drama.
Andrew Hinderaker
Collosal
Andrew Hinderaker is a Resident Playwright of Chicago Dramatists, an ensemble member of the Gift Theatre in Chicago, and a three-time Jeff Award Nominee. His plays include I Am Going To Change The World, Dirty, Kingsville and Suicide, Incorporated, which premiered at the Gift in 2010 and was subsequently produced Off-Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre. Hinderaker’s newest play, Colossal, featuring a dance company, a drumline, and a fully-padded football team, was the recent recipient of multiple awards from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Hinderaker has been hailed as “a hugely-exciting, risk-taking young writer” by the Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones, and as an author of “stupid, soapy melodrama” by a critic he’d prefer not acknowledge by name. His plays have been produced and/or developed by Manhattan Theatre Club, the Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf, the Araca Group, the Alliance Theatre, Mixed Blood, No Rules Theatre Company, Victory Gardens, Rattlestick, Stage Left, and several others. He currently holds commission from the Roundabout Theatre Company and Marc Platt Productions, and completed his M.F.A. in Playwriting at the University of Texas in Austin. Hinderaker is a member of the 2013-2014 Playwrights’ Unit at the Goodman Theatre.
Jacob Juntunen
In the Shadow of His Language
Before Jacob Juntunen was a father heading the playwriting MFA at SIU and living in St. Louis, he was a 1970s kid in California watching PBS puppets. In the 1990s, Jacob was a high school dropout making sandwiches at a deli in Portland. The teachers at Clackamas Community College and Edward Albee saved him, and he got degrees from Reed College and Northwestern. In 1998 he saw a VHS tape of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatre with mannequins and he’s lived in Poland repeatedly to understand it. Now, he collaborates with his students a bunch, and he founded Contraband Theatre in 2016. His plays include See You in a Minute (a comedic pandemic play set in 2041), 18 Months After November, Hath Taken Away (the Book of Job in the modern Midwest), In the Shadow of His Language (his vexed feelings about academia), Joan’s Laughter (a kick-ass play about Joan of Arc!), and his most-produced shorts, No Winter No Worries (funny), and Saddam’s Lions (not funny). Jacob’s work has been supported by Alliance Theatre, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center (for puppets!!), Great Plains Theatre Conference, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Fulbright, the NEH, Krakow’s International Cultural Center, the Illinois Arts Council, and more. Jacob loves dramaturgs and has worked with Martine Kei Green-Rogers, Heather Helinsky, and Dan Smith. His plays and scholarship have been published by Routledge and Vintage. You can read his plays on New Play Exchange. His website has too many words, but, what can you do? He’s a writer. www.jacobjuntunen.com
C. Quintana
Scissoring
C. Quintana, or CQ (pronouns: she/any), is a queer writer with Cuban and New Orleans roots based on Canarsee and Munsee Lenape land in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. CQ's plays and musicals have been developed and produced nationwide. Scissoring (once a finalist for the 10th Annual Alliance-Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Award) received its world premiere at INTAR in New York City in 2018 and is now available via Dramatists Play Service. This past summer, CQ’s Audible Emerging Playwrights Fund audio play The 126-Year-Old Artist, directed by Estefanía Fadul, premiered on Audible and is now available via the platform. CQ’s television writing credits include AMC's upcoming Orphan Black: Echoes, ABC's The Baker and the Beauty, and the second season of Fox’s Alert: Missing Persons Unit. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Café Royal Cultural Foundation (for her novel-in-progress, The Twisted Fate of La Media Luna), MacDowell, Playwrights Realm, Van Lier/New Voices at The Lark, CubaOne, Lambda Literary, and Queer|Art, as well as commissions from the Carthage College New Play Initiative, The Kennedy Center, The Civilians, Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Project, and more. CQ holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University and is a proud member of the Writers Guild of America East. www.cquintana.com or @cquintanatown
