Jessica Bashline is an Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Miami. She was the Artistic Director and co-founder of Strange Sun Theater in NYC which develops new plays. Jessica is a multi-faceted theater artist; working as a playwright, actor, director and educator with a primary interest in developing new plays. www.jessicabashline.com

Anna Morton is the Literary Director at Roundabout Theatre Company working on their Broadway and Off-Broadway productions as well as their New Work Initiative. As a dramaturg, she has worked with theatres including New York Theatre Workshop, McCarter Theatre Center, Westport Country Playhouse, and Shattered Globe Theatre. She holds a B.A. in English and Theater from Bowdoin College. www.roundabouttheatre.org

Megan Monaghan Rivas joined the University of Connecticut as Artistic Director of Connecticut Repertory Theatre and Department Head of Dramatic Arts in 2021 after serving as Interim Head of the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University, where she served on the faculty starting in 2013. In prior years she served as literary manager of South Coast Repertory Theatre, and as literary director of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and Frontera @ Hyde Park Theatre in Austin, TX. She oversaw the artistic programming for playwrights at the Lark Play Development Center in New York City and The Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis. She has freelanced with the New Harmony Project, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Geffen Playhouse, Quantum Theatre, Aurora Theatre, the Salt Lake Acting Company, TheatreSquared, Actors Express Theatre, and Horizon Theatre. She is the author of an original gender-bending adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers, and a separate original play riffing on Dumas’ characters set among women workers in the French Resistance, entitled Three Musketeers: 1941. Megan has been honored with the Elliott Hayes Prize in Dramaturgy. drama.uconn.edu/person/Megan-Rivas/

Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, PhD (Cultural Anthropology), MA (Anthropology), MFA (Theater), Women’s Studies (Graduate Certificate), BA (Journalism); is an Associate Professor of Urban Theater and Community Engagement. Recipient of the 2013 Associate Provosts for the Arts Grant; a 2008 Research and Creative Seed Grant Co-recipient, a 2003 Provost’s Arts Commission Grant; a 2001 Independence Foundation Theater Communications Group Grant, the 2000 winner of the PEW Charitable Trust fellowship in scriptwriting, and the 1999, winner of the DaimlerChrysler “Spirit of the Word” National Poetry Competition. Author of Through Smiles and Tears: The History of African American Theater (From Kemet to the Americas) (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011); The Secret Messages in African American Theater: Hidden Meaning Embedded in Public Discourse (Edwin Mellen Publishing, 2006) she has had over twenty-three of her plays produced. Her stage credits include thirteen productions and she is a contributing poet to twenty-six poetry anthologies.