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Lee Blessing (head of playwriting) has written plays for Broadway and London's West End. His play, A Walk in the Woods, was also seen on PBS's American Playhouse. His off-Broadway plays include A Body of Water; Going to St. Ives, which won an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Village Voice Obie Award; Thief River, which was nominated for a Drama Desk Award; Cobb, which won a Drama Desk Award; Chesapeake; Eleemosynary; and Down the Road. The Signature Theatre Company devoted its 1992-1993 season exclusively to his work, performing Fortinbras, Lake Street Extension, Two Rooms, and the world premiere of Patient A. Recent world premieres include Great Falls, at the 2008 Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays; A Body of Water, performed at the Guthrie and Old Globe Theaters; Lonesome Hollow, Flag Day, and Whores, all at the Contemporary American Theater Festival; The Scottish Play at the La Jolla Playhouse; Black Sheep at the Florida Stage; and The Winning Streak at the George Street Playhouse. He has also written Riches, Independence, Old-Timers Game, Nice People Dancing to Good Country Music, Perilous Night, and a new play commissioned by Philadelphia's InterAct Theatre Company, When We Go Upon the Sea. The Cleveland Play House also commissioned him to write an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's novel, Heaven's My Destination, which premiered in April 2009. He has won many awards, including the Steinberg/American Theater Critics Association Award and citation, Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, Great American Play Award, HUMANITAS Prize, and George and Elisabeth Marton Award, among others. He has also received nominations for the Tony and Olivier awards, as well as the Pulitzer Prize. Blessing is married to playwright and TV writer Melanie Marnich and lives in New York. He is a current member or alumnus of the Writers Guild of America, West; Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis; New Dramatists in New York; and Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques.Richard Dresser
(television writing) has
plays that are widely produced regionally and New York
and in Europe.His off-Broadway plays include Rounding
Third, Below the Belt, Gun-Shy, and Better
Days. His other plays include Alone at the Beach, The Downside, Something
in the Air, and Wonderful World.His short plays include At
Home, Bed and 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 NBC/Lifetime's The Last Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (with Blair Brown),
HBO's Vietnam War Stories, NBC's Smoldering Lust
(with Kate Capshaw), Fox's Bakersfield,
P.D., Madigan Men (with
Gabriel Byrne), The Job (with Denis
Leary), The Education of Max Bickford
(with Richard Dreyfuss), and Fox's Keen Eddie. He has written pilots for all
the networks and has written screenplays for Paramount, Universal, Dreamworks, Touchstone,
Imagine, and Fox. He received his B.A.
degree from Brown University and M.A. degree from the University
of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.
His recent projects include writing the book for the
musical Red Sox Nation, which opened
in May 2010 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, under the direction of Diane Paulus. and the play The Last Days of Mickey and Jean, which opened in spring 2010 at Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, Massachusetts. He is writing and producing a short
TV/internet series, Lifecoach, with
Cheri Oteri, which he created for AMC.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 Eugene O'Neill Theater 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 the South Coast Repertory Company and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Ryan has written screenplays for Disney, Warner Bros., and 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 aired on cable by Showtime and released 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 at New School University, where he taught for nine years.
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