Lee Blessing (head of playwriting) has had plays produced throughout the world at all levels of theater. His play, A Walk in the Woods, opened on Broadway in 1988, starring Sam Waterston and Robert Prosky. It won a number of prizes and was nominated for the Tony and Olivier awards, as well as the Pulitzer Prize. It has also appeared in London's West End, where it starred Sir Alec Guinness. It has since been seen in productions worldwide and televised on PBS's American Playhouse. Other New York productions include Eleemosynary (Manhattan Theatre Club), Going to St. Ives (Primary Stages), Cobb (produced by Kevin Spacey and Melting Pot Theatre at the Lucille Lortel Theatre), Thief River (Signature Theatre), Chesapeake (produced by New York Stage & Film and Jim Freydberg at the Second Stage Theatre), Down the Road (produced by the Weissberger Group) as well as the entire 1992-93 season of the Signature Theatre, including Fortinbras, Lake Street Extension, Two Rooms and the world-premiere of Patient A. Mr. Blessing's A Body of Water won the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Association Award (ATCA) after world premiering at the Guthrie Theater in 2005. Other regional world premieres include The Scottish Play (La Jolla Playhouse), Flag Day and Whores (Contemporary American Theater Festival), Black Sheep (Florida Stage), and Riches, Independence, Nice People Dancing to Good Country Music, and Oldtimers Game (Actors Theatre of Louisville). He collaborated with such directors as Lloyd Richards, Jim Houghton, Des McAnuff, Jon Jory, Maria Mileaf, Mark Lamos, Ethan McSweeny, Melia Bensussen, Daniel Fish, Lucie Tiberghien, and Ed Herendeen. Awards won by Mr. Blessing's productions include the Steinberg/ATCA (also won for A Walk in the Woods), Obie, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, Humanitas, Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle and Drama-Logue among many others. His work has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Guggenheim, Bush, McKnight and Jerome Foundations. Mr. Blessing's prize-winning screenplay, Cooperstown, starred Alan Arkin and Graham Greene and aired on TNT Screenworks. He cowrote the Andrew Davis film, Steel Big, Steal Little, and has written screenplays for Lifetime, HBO, Fox, and NBC/USA networks. He has also written episodes for several series, including Homicide: Life on the Street, Picket Fences, and Nothing Sacred. Many of his plays have been stage-read at the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference as well as at the Sundance Institute, PlayLabs, New River Dramatists, and the Ojai, New Harmony, and Seven Devils Playwrights conferences. He is an alumnus of both New Dramatists and the Playwrights's Center. Mr. Blessing is a graduate of Reed College and holds advanced degrees with specialties in poetry and playwriting from the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa. He has run the graduate playwriting program at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University since 2001. Other sites of teaching have included the Michener Center at the University of Texas (Austin), Denison University, the University of Southern California, the University of Iowa, the Sewanee Writer's Conference, and The Playwrights' Center. Mr. Blessing's most recent plays include Great Falls and Lonesome Hollow.
Richard Dresser (television writing) has plays that are widely produced regionally, in New York and in Europe. Off-Broadway plays include Rounding Third, Below The Belt, Gun-Shy, and Better Days. Other plays include: Alone At The Beach, The Downside, Something In The Air and Wonderful World. Short plays include: At Home, Bed & Breakfast, Splitsville, The Road to Ruin, and What Are You Afraid Of? His trilogy about happiness in America with each play set in a different social class includes Augusta (the working-class play), The Pursuit Of Happiness (the middle-class play), and A View Of The Harbor (the upper-class play). He also wrote the book for the Broadway musical Good Vibrations and the screenplay for Human Error, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He twice attended the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference and is a former member of New Dramatists. His television credits as writer/producer include The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (NBC/Lifetime with Blair Brown), HBO's Vietnam War Stories (for which he won the ACE award), Smoldering Lust (for NBC with Kate Capshaw), Bakersfield, P.D. (for Fox), Madigan Men (with Gabriel Byrne), The Job (with Denis Leary), The Education of Max Bickford (with Richard Dreyfuss), and Keen Eddie (for Fox). He has written pilots for all the networks and is currently developing pilots for CBS and HBO. He has written screenplays for Paramount, Universal, Dreamworks, Touchstone, Imagine, and Fox. He received his B.A. degree from Brown University and M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
James Ryan (screenwriting) has written over 15 plays and a dozen screenplays. His work has been produced at Playwrights Horizons, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Circle Repertory Theatre, Act One in Los Angeles, the O'Neill Theatre Center, and Berkeley Stage Company, among other venues. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; he has received a Drama League Award and a McKnight Fellowship. He has also received residencies at Yaddo and the Millay Colony and commissions from South Coast Repertory Company and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Mr. Ryan has written screenplays for Disney and Warner Bros. Spring Creek Productions and recently completed an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Found in the Street for Granada Films and Mr. Mudd. He wrote and directed The Young Girl and the Monsoon, a feature film which had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival; released by Artistic License Films in North America, it was also released on cable by Showtime and on DVD by Vanguard International Video. The film won the Gold Medal, Jury Prize, and Best Screenplay Award at the Wine County Film Festival and the Best Actress Award at The American Film Institute's Los Angeles International Film Festival; it has been shown in Israel, France, and Cuba. For TV, he has written for Showtime, Lifetime, and ABC daytime television. He began his career as an actor, studying with Uta Hagen, and appeared in the films, Five Corners, Falling in Love, and Joe vs. The Volcano. His plays are published by Dramatists Play Service, Samuel French, and Smith and Kraus. His book Screenwriting from the Heart: The Technique of the Character-Centered Screenplay, is published by Billboard Books. He served as chair of the playwriting department at the Actors Studio Drama School/New School University, where he taught for nine years.
