Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition: 2012/2013

Winner: Mike Lew 

Bike America

Winning the Kendeda Award in 2013 was a huge kickstarter for my career. After the production of Bike America, I came back to the Alliance with my play Tiger Style! and have gone on to a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Mellon/Howlround NPRP Residency (with my wife and fellow playwright Rehana Lew Mirza) at Ma-Yi Theater in New York. My play Teenage Dick (an adaptation of "Richard III" set in high school) had productions with Ma-Yi/The Public in NYC, the Huntington in Boston, and Donmar Warehouse in London. My latest play tiny father is having productions at Barrington, Chautauqua, and the Geffen in LA. I've also branched out into musicals and am co-writing the book (alongside Rehana and our composer Sam Willmott) to a musical called Bhangra Nation - about intercollegiate competitive Indian folk dance. Bhangra Nation premiered at La Jolla Playhouse and is up next at Birmingham Rep in the UK. Oh, and I'm now a father of two; during Tiger Style!, Rehana was pregnant with our first and got seriously addicted to the pimento cheese sandwiches at Highland Bakery. So Atlanta's now in our family blood. 

Peter Floyd 

Absence 

A New Hampshire native, Peter Floyd came to Boston as a student and has lived in the city for all his adult life. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a degree in political science, Peter has worked as a library aide, a graduate admissions officer, a software quality engineer, and (currently) a programmer for a medical software company based in Cambridge. 

Peter’s playwriting career began with the short play The Little Death, which premiered at MIT in 2005. It subsequently appeared in the Playwrights’ Platform Festival the following year, where it won the Audience Choice award for best play. It has since been published by Heuer Publishing. Other short plays have appeared in the Boston Theater Marathon, the Devanaughn Theatre’s Dragonfly Festival, the New England Fringe Festival, and many other venues. Peter’s short plays have appeared in Smith & Kraus’s Best Ten-Minute Play anthologies for 2015 (Too, Too Solid Flesh) and 2017 (Evolution).  

In 2010 he began his studies in the playwriting MFA program at Boston University, where his instructors included Kate Snodgrass, Ronan Noone, Melinda Lopez, and Richard Schotter. Over the course of his time at BU, he developed his first full-length play, Absence. Peter received his Master of Fine Arts in January of 2012. In February 2012, Absence was named co-winner of the Kennedy Center’s Jean Kennedy Smith Award. Later that year, it was named a finalist for the Alliance Theatre of Atlanta’s Kendeda Award. The play had two readings at the Alliance in 2013, and in January 2014 had a reading presented by the Midtown Direct Rep theater company of South Orange, New Jersey, with Olympia Dukakis playing the leading role. The play received its first full production at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in February-March 2014, for which it was nominated for Best New Script for both the Elliot Norton and IRNE awards, and its first international production at the Oslo Nye Trikkestallen in Norway in September-October 2015. It has had further productions in Sweden and Italy, as well as the United States. 

In the summer of 2012, Peter developed his play The Centipede King at the MFA Playwrights’ Workshop at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Peter was selected as one of four New Voices @ New Rep Playwriting Fellows for 2012-13, sponsored by the New Repertory Theatre of Watertown, MA; for this program he wrote the play Protocol. With the onset of the Pandemic, Peter turned his attention from drama to prose. He has written several fantasy stories that have appeared in GigaNotoSaurus, The Arcanist, and Bards and Sages Quarterly. Peter lives in Chestnut Hill, MA, with his lovely and patient wife Vinita. 

Neeley Gossett 

Roman Candle Summer 

Neeley Gossett co-founded Found Stages, a professional immersive theatre in Atlanta. Her play, Beulah Creek was Found Stages’ first production, held at Dunwoody Nature Center in 2014. In 2017, Alliance Theatre produced her play, Alice Between. Roman Candle Summer was a Kendeda finalist, and Decoration Day was chosen as Alliance’s 2016 Kendeda Alumnus Reading. She is a recipient of Alliance's Reiser Atlanta Artists Lab. Her works have previously received productions and readings at The Weird Sister Theatre Project, Theatre Emory, 7 Stages, Horizon Theatre, Great Plains Theatre Conference, and many others. Several of her plays for Young Audiences are published by YouthPLAYS.  Frankenstein's Funeral, an immersive play she co-wrote with Annie Harrison Elliot, Nichole Palmietto, and Addae Moon, premiered in 2019. The AJC named her one of the “8 Atlanta playwrights to watch in 2020.” She is currently pivoting her focus from playwriting and producing to pop culture research.
 
Neeley holds an M.F.A. from The Playwright’s Lab at Hollins University, an M.A. in English from The University of North Carolina Wilmington and a B.A. in Theater Arts from Marymount Manhattan College. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgia State University’s Perimeter College and is the Honors College Coordinator for the Dunwoody and Alpharetta Campuses.

Diana Grisanti 

River City 

Diana Grisanti is a playwright and educator whose work has been produced across the country. Her plays include Enter Ghost. an immersive haunted Hamlet experience (co-written with Steve Moulds, for Kentucky Shakespeare); Lawbreakers! (a fast and furious history of women’s suffrage) (StageOne Family Theatre); The Patron Saint of Losing Sleep (Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte); River City (National New Play Network); …Ghost Party (Cleveland Play House); and the bilingual musicals The City Dog and the Prairie Dog, Casa Alfonsa, and The Guava Tree / El Guayabo (co-written with composer Emiliano Messiez, for Creede Repertory Theatre). Currently she’s at work on Vanessa in Bed, an audio-play for Audible Theatre. Diana has been a Michener Fellow, a Kentucky Arts Council Fellow, and a Writer in Residence at Vanderbilt University. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in Theatre Arts from the University of Iowa. She teaches dramatic writing at Ball State University. Find out more at dianagrisanti.com. 

Janine Nabers 

Annie Bosh is Missing

Janine Nabers is an Emmy nominated TV writer and is in an overall deal at Amazon Studios. She has been named one of Adweek’s Creative 100 in 2023. Most recently, SWARM, the culturally buzzy series she co-created and Executive Produces with Donald Glover debuted on the streamer. She is developing a series with Prentice Penny at HBO, executive producing QUILLS with Rob Williams and Javier Bardem at Searchlight, developing SYD at Annapurna as well as a project with Lucky Chap at Amazon. Janine was a Co-Executive Producer writing on seasons 3 and 4 of ATLANTA on FX. Other credits include HBO's WATCHMEN for which she won a WGA Award, Co-Executive Producer on AWAY for Netflix, and Marti Noxon’s DIETLAND for AMC, UNREAL for Lifetime, and all five seasons of GIRLFRIEND’S GUIDE TO DIVORCE at Bravo. Janine won the Yale Drama Series prize from over 1,600 entries from around the world for her play SERIAL BLACK FACE. A native of Houston, Texas, Janine is a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellowship at Juilliard.