Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition: 2014/2015

Winner: Tsehaye Geralyn Hébert

The C.A. Lyons Project  

Tsehaye Geralyn Hébert is a bona fide gumbo girl!  She triaged  between her father’s rural Pointe Coupeé family seat, her Baton Rouge, LA birthplace, and her mother’s beloved New Orleans. Her works are steeped in place and migrations, in myth, and history, positioning a canvas of the American South. The second great grand-daughter of Louisiana Creole storyteller, Dorlis Aguillard,  Hébert honors the family’s Afro-Creole culture and traditions.  The hyperbole of Mardi Gras, an unrelenting urban scape, and rural America all ground and inform her work. 

The Northwestern University and School of the Art Institute Chicago alum chronicled works spanning a century in The Chicago Quartet for her MFA thesis.  Each work earned distinction and won the 11th annual Alliance Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition (The C.A. Lyons Project).  Hebert is the first African American woman and first person with a disability to do so and the first alum of both institutions to have won.  The C. A. Lyons Project later earned four of its five 2015 Suzy Bass nominations. 

Hébert is a Sundance Theatre Finalist for her latest work (Tale of the Lychee Woman). This play was also a 2020 Season Reading Selection for the Something Wonderful Festival.  She is a Voices Rising Fellow at Vermont Studio Center (You Are Cordially Invited to Tea, Mrs. B.); a 3Arts Bodies of Work Fellow (Everything I Need to Know About Disability I Learned Being Black); and RHINOFest SAIC winner (pygMALI). Her plays have appeared at Down for the Count, Bishop Arts Theater Center, Dallas TX, Black Lives/Black Words, (I Get the Blues, Sometimes I Do); Muse Festival, Pegasus Theatre (Holtzclaw: Lottery Ticket #263); and Cultural DC/SourceFest (Elegy for Miss Lucy).  

Hebert’s ambitious larger-than-life stories lead her to dream big and bring her whole imagination to her work.  She embraces hybridity and experiment. As a playwright steeped in polyglot Black America and African Creole cultures, she works in many languages.  The Alliance production of her work integrated ASL and leveraged tech to deliver a robust vision for theatre making.  The joy of inclusion was palpable and catalyzed a new way of making inclusive and accessible theatre for the playwright.  Her work explores the beauty and power of story in all its forms.   

In addition to theatre, Hébert is a fiction writer and essayist. She was a finalist for The Frank McCourt Essay Contest (“Last Night I Went to Vietnam”). Chicago Quarterly Review #33, An Anthology of Black American Literature (Charles Johnson Ph.D, ed. 2022) published her short story (“Off the Wall”). Readings from The Chicago Quartet slated for the 2024-2025 season feature her work.  Hébert was one of 80 poets selected internationally to celebrate Gwendolyn Brooks’ 80th birthday.   

The citizen playwright is a member of The Dramatist Guild, and active in artists housing, accessibility, inclusion and arts engagement initiatives (Community of the Arts; Artists Design the Future; Disability Lead; the Cultural Collaborative).   

Kimberly Barrante 

An Alien in Inwood 

Kimberly Barrante is the geeky offspring of a chemist and a librarian. She began her career as a playwright in New York City, after receiving a BA from Emerson College. She received her MFA in Dramatic Writing at Tisch NYU before moving to Los Angeles. Her award-winning screenplay Celeritas was on the Annual Black List in 2014. It was later performed on The Black List Table Reads Podcast in 2015. Kim completed a feature-writing fellowship at Lionsgate Studios in 2016. She has gone on to work in both features and television. Her pilot, Sedna, was recently optioned to Universal Content Productions. Composition 8 is attached to produce. As a copywriter, she has written explainer videos and marketing for Hyperscience and LEGO®. She has also worked as a storyboard artist, storyboarding both live action and animated videos for Hyperscience, Pitney Bowes, Steel Series, and LEGO®. She is attracted to companies that are fair trade, environmentally conscious, embrace diversity, and are cruelty free. She likes brands with a sense of humor, but also heart. 

Michael Yates Crowley 

Evanston: A Rare Comedy 

Michael Yates Crowley is a writer and performer whose work has been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Berlin, Edinburgh, and elsewhere. His works for theater include Block Association Project (Humana Festival premiere); The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Grace B Matthias (Playwrights Realm at The Duke on 42nd Street), Song of a Convalescent Ayn Rand… (Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater), Evanston: A Rare Comedy (O’Neill National Playwrights Conference selection), and TEMPING, which has been performed over 1,000 times at venues including Lincoln Center, American Repertory Theater, and three sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Together with the director Michael Rau, he founded the narrative technology company Wolf 359. Honors: New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting fellowship, Playwrights Realm Page One residency, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, Ars Nova Play Group, Millay Colony residency, Academy of Theater and Digitality 2024 Fellowship (Germany). Education: Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrights Program at Juilliard. 

Emily Dendinger 

Pockeftul of Sand 

Emily Dendinger is a New York-based writer by way of Virginia. Her plays include No Home for Bees (2017 Source Festival Finalist), Little House in the Big City (2017 NNPN Showcase Finalist), and Pocketful of Sand (winner of the 2016 Activate Midwest New Play Award and 2015 Alliance/Kendeda finalist). She is a two-time winner of Theater Masters and has been a finalist for the City Theatre National Award, Ingram New Works Lab at Nashville Rep, 2017 Emerald Prize, Playwrights Center Core Apprenticeship, and Heideman Award. Emily has worked around the country with companies including The Acting Company, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Route 66, The Lark, Sideshow Theatre, The Alliance, NNPN, Curious Theatre Company, NJ Rep, Orlando Shakes, Ashland New Play Festival, and TimeLine Theatre. Her work has been developed at The Perry Mansfield Festival of New Work, Durango New Play Festival, and Tofte Lake Residency. Emily was a 2015-2016 NNPN Playwright-in-Resident, and is an alumni member of TimeLine’s Writers Collective and an NNPN affiliate artist. She currently has a pilot in development with Glickmania. MFA: University of Iowa 

Georgette Kelly 

Ballast 

Georgette Kelly is a playwright with one foot in Chicago and the other in New York.  Her work has been produced across the country, and she has participated in numerous artistic residencies, including the 2018-2019 Goodman Playwrights Unit. Her play I Carry Your Heart received the inaugural Hope on Stage Playwriting Award, accompanied by a rolling world premiere, and Ballast was featured on The Kilroys List and received the Craig Noel Award for Outstanding New Play.  Other plays include: Farewell Opportunity, North Star, Faith in a Fallen World, In the Belly of the Whale, F*ck La Vie D'Artiste, How to Hero, and an adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping.  Georgette’s work has been developed with The Kennedy Center, The National New Play Network, The DC Source Festival, The Alliance Theatre, Diversionary Theatre, and Chicago’s DCASE.  She is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists, a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, and she has participated in residencies at the Tofte Lake Center, the National Winter Playwrights Retreat, and terraNOVA Groundbreakers Playwrights Group.  She has been chosen as a finalist for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference, the Lark Playwrights Week, the Playwrights’ Center CORE Writer Program, the BPP Woodward/Newman Drama Award, the Stage Left Playwright Residency, and the Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition.  Georgette holds a B.A. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Hunter College, where she studied with Tina Howe, Arthur Kopit, and Mark Bly.