Mukta Phatak
Mukta Phatak is a playwright, actor and teaching artist based in New York City. Her writing has been produced/developed at the Children’s Theater of Charlotte, Ancram Opera House, The Workshop Theater, Trike Theatre and in devised works as part of Fringe festivals. She has also written extensively for children through her work with Mind Body Music NYC.
Mukta is a project-seeker and much of her work blossoms from the creative communities she cultivates. A proud daughter of Indian immigrants, her intersectional identities are at the core of her artistry. In her writing, acting and everyday life she strives to be a force for justice, learning, and play.
Jordan Ramirez Puckett
Jordan Ramirez Puckett is a Chicanx writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Their plays include A Sapphic Family Christmas, Transitional Love Stories, Untitled Dad Play, Huelga, En Las Sombras, To Saints and Stars, A Driving Beat, Las Pajaritas, Restore, and Inevitable. These works have been produced and/or developed by Abingdon Theatre Company, Creede Repertory Theatre, Flint Repertory Theatre, Goodman Theatre, Intar Theatre, Playwrights Realm, San Diego Repertory Theatre, San Francisco Playhouse, and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, among others. Jordan was named a finalist for the 2022 Yale Drama Series Prize and is a 2024 graduate of the Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program.
Deneen Reynolds-Knott
Deneen Reynolds-Knott’s plays include BITING THE HAND (Florida Studio Theatre Commission, 2022), SHOEBOX PICNIC ROAD SIDE: ROUTE ONE (World Premiere at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Fall 2021), BABES IN HO-LLAND (2020 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, World Premiere at, Shotgun Players, Winter 2024), PARTICULARLY MEDDLESOME ANCESTORS (2022 Ingram New Works Festival, Nashville Rep) and BATON (2018 Premiere Stages Play Festival, Staged reading at Florida Studio Theatre’s 2022 Summer Reading Theatre, San Diego Rep’s 2021 Black Voices Reading Series). She contributed work to 24/6: A Jewish Theater Company’s Telephone Plays, True Colors’ 2022 Next Narrative Monologue Competition and The Billie Holiday Theatre’s 50in50: Shattering the Glass Ceiling. Deneen was a member of Clubbed Thumb’s 2019-2020 Early-Career Writers’ Group and participated in SPACE at Ryder Farm’s Family Residency in Summer 2022. She is a New Georges affiliated artist.
Amy Staats
Amy Staats is a writer, actor, director, producer, and a 2018 Tow Playwright in Residence through the Atlantic Theater Company.
The world premiere of Amy’s play EDDIE AND DAVE had an extended run off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater and co-starred Amy in the role of ‘Eddie Van Halen.”
Her one-act play, THROWS OF LOVE, has received multiple productions and is the winner of the Samuel French Short Play Festival. Other plays include BAT KITTY (The Momentum Festival); I HOPE SHE’LL BE OKAY (New Works Now) and HANDS (developed at ATC and SPACE at Ryder Farm). As an actor, Amy most recently performed the lead in the Broadway production of THE THANKSGIVING PLAY (u/s three performances). She is a resident artist at Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor and SPACE on Ryder farm (RIP), an affiliated artist with New Georges, and a semi-finalist at Sundance Theater Lab and The O’Neill Playwrights Festival. Her Russian spy/gymnastics dramedy DEFECTED is in development with Olivia Wingate (MO Studios) and Wren Arthur (Olive Productions).
Danielle Stagger
Danielle Stagger is a playwright and performer from Queens, NY. Her plays largely engage questions of performance, respectability, and shame through the exploration of the appropriate and the forbidden. She prioritizes the authentic presence of Blackness, queerness, and womanhood both on and off stage and, as an artist in practice, works to decentralize and destabilize the product-driven, linear theatrical process. Danielle is the inaugural recipient of the Lily’s Lorraine Hansberry Fellowship, is a two-time Eugene O’Neill NPC Finalist, and was a nominee for the 2024 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Danielle’s plays have been finalists for the SoHo Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Ollie New Play Award, and the Lark’s Venturous Playwrights Fellowship. She has been commissioned by Second Stage Theater and Manhattan Theatre Club; she holds a B.A. in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University and an MFA in Playwriting from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.