Katori Hall is a playwright-performer hailing from Memphis, Tennessee. Her plays include Hoodoo Love (mentored by Lynn Nottage, 3 AUDELCO nominations, 1 win, published by DPS), Remembrance, Hurt Village, Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, The Mountaintop, On The Chitlin’ Circuit, Oreogirl (published by the Ninth Letter) and Freedom Train. Her work has been developed and presented at the following venues: the Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival, the American Repertory Theatre, Kennedy Center, Cherry Lane Theatre, Classical Theatre of Harlem, BRICLab, Women’s Project, World Financial Center, Lark Play Development Center, New Professional Theatre, Stanford University, and Columbia University.
Hall has been published as a book reviewer, journalist, and essayist in publications such as The Boston Globe, Essence, and Newsweek. She is the recipient of numerous awards including two Lecompte du Nouy Prizes from Lincoln Center, NYSCA Grant, New Professional Theatre Writers’ Festival award, Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, NYFA Fellowship, Royal Court Theatre Residency, and the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award. She has been nominated for the Wendy Wasserstein Prize and the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.
She has been a Kennedy Center Playwriting Fellow at the O’Neill. She was a member of the 2007-2008 Lark Playwrights’ Workshop and the 2006-2008 Women’s Project Playwrights’ Lab. She is currently the playwright-in-residence at the Women’s Project. She is a member of the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writer's Group at Primary Stages.
As an actor, Hall’s credits include Law & Order: SVU, The President’s Puppets (The Public), Growing Up a Slave (American Place Theatre), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (American Place Theatre), the world premiere of Amerika (Theatre de la Juene Lune/American Repertory Theatre), Spring Awakening (Moscow Art Theatre School), Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (Classical Theatre of Harlem), Schooled (WOW Café Theatre) and Black Girl (Sande Shurin Theatre).
She graduated undergrad from Columbia University in 2003 with a major in African-American Studies and Creative Writing. She was awarded top departmental honors from the university’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS). In 2005, she graduated from the American Repertory Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University with a Master of Fine Arts in Acting. She currently attends the Juilliard Lila Acheson Wallace playwriting program.
Check out www.katorihall.com
Samuel D. Hunter is originally from Moscow, Idaho. He received his BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 2004, an MFA from the Iowa Playwrights Workshop in 2007, and is currently a playwright-in-residence at the Juilliard School. His plays include: I AM MONTANA at the 2007 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and the 2007 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, NORMAN ROCKWELL KILLED MY FATHER at the 2005 O'Neill Playwrights Conference, ABRAHAM (A SHOT IN THE HEAD) at Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, ABRAHAM (I AM AN ISLAND) in Studio 42's Scattered Festival at Collective: Unconscious, PIGHEART in the 2007 Iowa New Play Festival, and his newest play, IDAHO / DEAD IDAHO, which received its first reading at Juilliard this Spring. Sam has taught at the University of Iowa, Fordham University, and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories at Ashtar Theater (Ramallah) and Ayyam al-Masrah (Hebron).
During her PONY year, Carson finished a commission for the Guthrie Theater, BE HERE NOW, and attended the opening in Minneapolis. She also finished TINY ROOMS, her commission for Next Theatre in Chicago. She finished a draft for ENCHANTMENT, her play on Bruno Bettelheim and Temple Grandin, which was read at Stanford University and the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley through Lark's partnership with Playwrights Foundation, and at the Lark in the final readings for Playwrights' Workshop. She will continue work on this piece at JAW West and two new plays at retreats with Partial Comfort Productions and the Lark at New York Stage and Film. She also started work with collaborator Erin Kamler on RUNWAY 69, a musical set in that notorious strip-club on the eve of the Times Square cleanup. The book was read at the Lark, and readings of Acts One and Two at New Dramatists. She and Erin were awarded the Loewe Award, which will support a larger workshop in the next year. Carson also signed with Bruce Ostler and Mark Orsisi at Brett Adams Ltd.