Third year MFA playwrights pictured above from left to right: Garret Schneider, Ryan Dowler, and David Robinson.

Third-Year MFA Playwrights (2009-10):

Ryan Dowler: Ryan was born and raised in West Texas. He was among the top six in the nation in Duet Acting at the International Thespian Conference in 2000, before attending Ole Miss on an acting scholarship. As a student in the BFA Acting program, he pursued a degree in Sociology with a specialization in Gender Studies.  After presenting a paper on corporate interests and gender at the UM Gender Conference in 2002, he left Ole Miss to write about his experiences working for one year as an employee at a McDonalds Restaurant outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In 2005, he completed his work in Sociology, earning a degree from the University of North Texas while making his directorial debut with David Marshall Grant’s Snakebit (“Venom Flows in Splendid Snakebit” – Dallas Morning News). Ryan then spent a year at the University of Texas, El Paso coordinating a new play series and developing West Memphis, a play that examines the role of small town religion in the high-profile prosecution of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr. for the murder of three eight-year-old boys in rural Arkansas. His short play, Mammals which deals with the issue of gender, received a reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and was awarded first place in the KCACTF National Ten Minute Play competition. In 2008, Mammals was produced in the United States and the U.K. while touring with the North American Playwrights Alliance; in 2009, it was published by Third Coast. Ryan is the author of the plays, Spitz/her, A Room in Another Part of the World, and The Atheist’s Guide to Sex. Most recently his short play, Something Like Loneliness was produced as part of the one-act festival, Beyond Convention in Orange County, California and by the Aporia Repertory Theater Company in New York. Ryan’s work has been performed at theaters across the country including Seattle Repertory Theatre, Hunger Artists Theater, Hyde Park Theatre, and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.

David Robinson's artistic sensibilities are formed in equal parts by the austerity of endless Twin Cities winters and the balmy exuberance of South Florida. A native Minnesotan, David received his BA in Literature/Theater from the New College of Florida and is currently in his third year in Ohio University's MFA Playwriting Program, where he studies under Charles Smith and Erik Ramsey. His work has been performed at Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theater, Ohio University and the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II. During his time at Ohio University, David has developed seven plays, including Family Matters, which was selected as a semifinalist for the 2009 WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory. Outside of the realm of dramatic writing, David has written theater and film criticism for The Bradenton Herald and the film magazine CineACTION. He is the recipient of Ohio University's 2009 Scott McPherson Playwriting Award. He is also the winner of the 2010 Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition. His winning play, Carapace, will receive its world premiere on the Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre's Hertz Stage in February, 2011.

Garret Schneider was born in a bubble in the middle of Maine, and has spent his entire life learning to thrive in it. His early stages of writing started in performance / SLAM poetry, and made the transition into plays while at Lehigh University. He graduated with a BA in Mathematics and Theatre from Lehigh University -- an artistic dichotomy, which was reflected in his first play: "Proud Beasts", centered around amphetamine-addicted mathematicians. His one-act, "Franky and Zoza", awarded him a place in the Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive, and he studied under Lee Blessing, Chay Yew, Marsha Norman, Mark Bly, Heather McDonald, Gary Garrison, Melanie Marnich, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. For the two years after Lehigh and before Ohio, Garret was a company member in Maine's Heartwood Regional Theater Company, and was in the New England premier of Will Eno's one-man show, "Thom Pain: Based on Nothing". Technology, those striving to be godlike, and exploring the definition of family is at the artistic heart of Garret's work. For more about Garret, please visit his web site at http://www.litpunk.com/.

Cecilia Copeland Cecilia Copeland grew up a Latin Jewish-Catholic non-princess in the heart of the American Midwest. She began her writing career when she revised her first one act play, Amusement Bomber, into a short film for Metro Screen Australia. After five years of living as an expatriate in Sydney, she returned to the University of Iowa to finish her BA in Theatre with Honors, Emphasis in Playwriting and a Minor in Dance. Her one act, Playing was given a production in the UDFestival at U of Iowa in 2007, and was also read in the 2009 KCACTF Region 3 receiving First Honorable Mention. Her piece on the life of Kaniko Fumiko, Words of a Revolutionary will be published in A History of Anarchism in Japan by Adrienne Hurley, 2010. Cecilia’s Honors Thesis One Woman was an official event for SWAN day in 2008. A portion of One Woman was read on KRUI Radio and in the U of Iowa’s New Play Festival in 2008. Her full length, Raising the Stakes was a finalist for the 2009 Seven Devils Playwrights Conference and Courting won the Stage Left Productions New Play Competition 2009. Last summer she taught Playscript Analysis for Actors at the Stella Adler Studio in New York and Interned with New Dramatists. She will have her Intern Alumni Reading at New Dramatists this spring. Cecilia is thrilled to be back in Athens for her second year. (En Español)

Jason Matthew Hall received his undergraduate degree in broadcast journalism, but has always been drawn to the infinite pleasures of creative and dramatic writing. Among the Oats, a cycle of six one-act plays, has received selected production at the University of Southern Maine and the Minnesota Fringe Festival. He has mentored a number of University of Pittsburgh's Red-Eye Theater Project writers and is playwright-in-residence to Marietta College's 24-hour Play Festival. He spends his summers teaching in programs for gifted and talented kids, working with the Festival of Creative Youth in Maine and more recently with Johns Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth. His comedy film, The Ballad of Faith Divine, recently won the Best Feature award at the Colony Film Festival in Marietta, Ohio. Jason also maintains The Stone House, a website devoted to Golden Age British mystery writer Gladys Mitchell. His personal website is found at www.jasonhallwrites.com.

First-Year MFA Playwrights (2009-10):

First year MFA playwrights pictured above from left to right: Ira Gamerman, Andrew Black, Leean Kim Torske, and Sarah Bowden.

Andrew Black was raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, and migrated to San Francisco, California in 1979. His undergraduate degree in Radio/TV from Indiana University led to a career writing scripts for corporate training programs and business consulting in corporate environments. He was involved in the underground theatre scene in San Francisco’s South of Market area for a number of years before writing his first full-length play Porn Yesterday in 2001. The tale of a gay male porno star who wants to change his life (co-written with Patricia Milton) was a finalist in a national playwriting contest in 2002, and was produced by the Fritz Theatre Company in San Diego in 2003. Several other productions of PY have followed. A second play (also written with Patricia) Strange Bedfellows followed, and a commission to write a murder mystery led to It’s Murder, Mary! produced by the New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco in 2008. ("Hilarious, high-spirited fun for everyone. . . Irresistible!" said Lee Hartgrave in his column, Beyond Chron.) Andrew became involved with the SF Bay Area’s PlayGround group, a company specializing in short format plays, and he has had ten-minute plays produced across the country. Topics have ranged from gay penguins trying to get onto Noah’s Ark to an ill-fated romance between the action figure G.I. Joe and Barbie’s long-term boyfriend Ken. Andrew won the New Works of Merit contest sponsored by the 13th Street Repertory Company in NYC for his play Another Dude’s Slingbacks, and a production is being scheduled there. The world premiere of his play The Second Weekend in September is scheduled for May of 2010 at the City Lights Theatre in San Jose.

Sarah Bowden originally hails from the Land of Lincoln, but her career as a playwright has fueled a move from the ever-changing prairieland to various cities on the East Coast. Most recently, she completed a two-year stint as the artistic associate with Philadelphia’s To The Wall Productions, and had staged readings of her works “Through the Valley” and Two Sides of a River performed at the Philadelphia Dramatists’ Center and Painted Bride Art Center, respectively. She produced “Grimm & Tonic: An Evening of Adapted Fairy Tales” with To The Wall, during which her short plays “Little Brother/Little Sister” and “Soot” were read. A graduate of Beloit College with a bachelor’s in creative writing and theatre arts (emphasis: acting and directing), she has completed internships with Theatre Building Chicago, Northlight Theatre, the O’Neill Center and the Adirondack Theatre Festival. Sarah was the recipient of the 2003 Magaret W. Baker Prize for fiction and the 2005 White-Howells English Prize for Drama.

Ira Gamerman received his B.A. in Theatre from Towson University. His award-winning plays include Split, Dated: Cautionary Tale For Facebook Users, and A Girl With A Black Eye. These plays have been produced and developed around the United States and Australia by such companies as: Collaboraction (at The Steppenwolf Garage), DC Source Festival, Umbc's In10 Festival, The Chicago New Media Summit, Route 66 Theatre Company, The Last Frontier Theatre Conference, The Kennedy Center Page To Stage Festival, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Chicago Dramatists’ First Draft Series, EBE Ensemble, Madlab, Single Carrot Theatre, Fort Point Theatre Channel, World Interplay, Mind The Gap Productions, University Of Alaska-Fairbanks, Milburn Stone Theatre, Towson University, and The Baltimore Playwrights Festival. Ira has participated in The Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Great Plains Theatre Conference, and World Interplay where he learned the craft of playwriting under such esteemed playwrights as: Edward Albee, Lee Blessing, Gary Garrison, Romulus Linney, Will Eno, Arthur Kopit, and Marsha Norman (to name a few). Ira won a playwriting grant from Maryland State Arts Council in 2005 and an Emerging Playwright Award from Chicago Union League in 2008. In 2009, he was nominated for a New York Innovative Theatre Award for best short script and in 2006 City Paper voted him “Best Playwright of Baltimore” in their annual “Best of Baltimore” issue. Ira has served as a playwright mentor for Center Stage’s Young Playwrights Festival, a judge for BPF, and is the founder of The Playwrights Group Of Baltimore. He is currently pursuing his MFA in playwriting at Ohio University. Ira is a member of the Dramatists Guild Of America. As a musician he fronts Baltimore-based Indie rock band Even So (www.myspace.com/evenso).

Leean Kim Torske is an Amerasian playwright from Wyoming. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English, Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Theatre in Playwriting and Directing, and her Master of Arts degree in English in Literary Studies from the University of Wyoming. Her play The Problem with Apples was 1st Runner Up in the 2008 Region VII Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival One Act Festival. She was the 2007 Region VII Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival One Act Festival winner with her play Three-Legged Dog. In 2006 her ten minute play Sorting Baggage was a finalist in the UMBD INTEN 10 Minute Play Competition, and it won the Audience Choice Award for Shorts by Skirts the same year. Leean also received a Meritorious Achievement Award in Directing from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for her production of Steve Martin’s play WASP.