Eliana Pipes, Playwright

ELIANA PIPES is a playwright, performer and filmmaker. Her plays include Dream Hou$e (world premiere co-production at Alliance Theater, Long Wharf Theater, and Baltimore Center Stage), Unf*ckwithable (Drama League DirectorFest), Cowboy and the Moon (Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellowship, NNPN MFA Playwright’s Workshop), Lorena: a Tabloid Epic (The Playwright’s Realm Scratchpad Series), and Stand and Wait (The Fire This Time Festival). She’s been awarded the KCACTF Harold & Mimi Steinberg Award and Ken Ludwig Scholarship, Leah Ryan Fund Prize for Emerging Women Writers, National Latinx Playwright Award, Dr. Floyd Gaffney National Playwriting Prize, and a two-time finalist status for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwriting Conference. As a filmmaker, she won the Academy Gold Fellowship for Women through the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the inaugural WAVE Grant through Wavelength Productions to support the production of her animated short film. BA Columbia University, MFA Playwriting Boston University. More at www.elianapipes.com

Laurie Woolery, Director

Laurie Woolery is a director, playwright, citizen artist who works in theaters across the country including The Public Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory, Trinity Repertory, Goodman Theatre, Cornerstone Theater Company, and South Coast Repertory. Projects include the world premiere of Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta at both Yale Repertory and Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the world premiere musical of As You Like It co-created with Shaina Taub for the Public Theater. Woolery has also directed world premieres of plays by Tanya Saracho, Charise Castro Smith, Marisela Trevino Orta, Aditi Kapil, and others. In 2020, Laurie produced the documentary Under The Greenwood Tree that tells the story of how the Public Works community banded together amidst the global pandemic and antiracist uprising. Woolery also curated a public art installation entitled The Seed Project that projected 164 Public Works community members sharing their hopes for the future on the façade of The Public Theater. Laurie has developed new work with diverse communities ranging from incarcerated women to residents of a Kansas town devastated by a tornado. She creates site-specific work ranging from a working sawmill in Eureka, California to the banks of the Los Angeles River. Laurie is the Director of Public Works at The Public Theater, a program that seeks to engage the people of New York by making them creators and not just spectators. Working with partner organizations in all 5 boroughs, Public Works invites members of diverse communities to join in the creation of ambitious works of participatory theater. Laurie is the former Associate Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company and Conservatory Director at South Coast Repertory. Laurie is a founding member of The Sol Project in New York and a proud recipient of the Fuller Road Fellowship for Women Directors of Color, a 2020 United States Artist recipient and the 2021 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities.

Website: www.lauriewoolery.com