Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition: 2015/2016

Winner: Eleanor Burgess 

Start Down 

Eleanor Burgess’s new play, Galilee, 34, will have its world premiere this Spring at South Coast Rep. Her previous plays, including The Niceties, Wife of a Salesman, Chill, Sparks Fly Upward, and Kendeda winner Start Down, have been produced at theaters across America, including Manhattan Theatre Club, Geffen Playhouse, McCarter Theatre Center, and the Huntington Theatre Company, Writers Theatre, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Geva Theatre Center and Merrimack Rep, as well as the Finborough Theatre in London. Eleanor has been a member of the Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group at Primary Stages, Page 73's writers' group Interstate 73, The Civilians’ R&D Group, and New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship. She has also written for film and television, including work on Perry Mason for HBO, WeCrashed for Apple TV+, and Interview With The Vampire for AMC. Originally from Massachusetts, she studied history at Yale College and Dramatic Writing at NYU/Tisch. 

Will Arbery 

The Confession 

Will Arbery is a playwright and screenwriter. His play Heroes of the Fourth Turning premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2019 and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, OBIE winner, Lortel winner, New York Drama Critics Circle Award winner, and was named one of the best plays of the year by The New York Times, Vulture, Time Out, and more. Other plays include: Corsicana (Playwrights Horizons), Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (The New Group), Plano (Clubbed Thumb), and Wheelchair (3 Hole Press). He was the recipient of a Whiting Award in 2020. TV: Succession and Irma Vep. His work has been featured in The Paris Review, and his plays are currently available from Concord Theatricals and TCG Books. He's currently under commission from The Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan Theatre Club, and Audible.www.willarbery.com

Hilary Bettis 

Ghost of Lote Bravo 

Hilary Bettis is a critically-acclaimed playwright whose work has been developed and produced all over the country including, Roundabout Theatre, New Georges, The Sol Project, Miami New Drama, Studio Theatre, Alley Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, La Jolla Playhouse, amongst others. Accolades include, Egerton Foundation New Play Awards, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a finalist for the Blackburn Prize, Kendeda Award, Nuestras Voces National Playwriting Competition, American Blues Theater’s Blue Ink Award, amongst others. In television Bettis won the 2019 Writer’s Guild of America Award for her work on the critically acclaimed, Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning FX series The Americans. She wrote for the Hulu miniseries The Dropout, starring Kate McKinnon, and Amazon’s Rodeo Queens starring Dakota Johnson and Fred Armisen. She’s an alumni of the Sundance Institute Episodic TV Lab, and is developing projects for AMC, Hulu, and PatMa. She’s a graduate of The Juilliard School. Proud member of The Kilroys and WGAEast. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband, two cats, and a tiny tiny human that cries a lot. She is represented by CAA and Grandview. www.HilaryBettisWriter.com

Nina Braddock 

Wishbone

Nina Braddock is a NY-based playwright and television writer. She was a Co-Executive Producer on The Untitled Ava Duvernay, Joshua Jackson and Lauren Ridloff Project for Starz. Previously she served as Executive Producer on The Sinner (USA), a Co-Executive Producer for Saint X (Hulu), a writer/producer on Servant (Apple), and wrote on The Bell Jar (Showtime), Brave New World (Peacock), and Berlin Station (Epix). Her play Untitled Baby Play received its world premiere at IAMA Theater Company at Atwater Village Theater in Spring 2022. She has developed plays with Clubbed Thumb, where she was a member of the 2016/17 Early Career Writers’ Group. She was awarded a 2016/17 Sloan Commission by Manhattan Theatre Club to write Unlucky Number: a play following three patients as they undergo a clinical study testing the relative efficacy of medication and exposure therapy for treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Her play Wishbone was a finalist for the 2016 Alliance/Kendeda Graduate National Playwriting Award, the Bay Area Play Festival, the Playwrights Realm fellowship and Interstate 73. She received an MFA in Dramatic Writing at Tisch where she was awarded the John Golden Playwriting Prize. 

Jen Silverman 

All the Roads Home 

Jen Silverman is a playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Plays include: Spain (2ST); The Moors (Yale Rep, Playwrights Realm); Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties (Woolly Mammoth, MCC Theater, Southwark Playhouse London); The Roommate (Humana Festival, Williamstown, Steppenwolf, South Coast, Long Wharf, etc); Witch (Writer’s Theatre, Geffen, Huntington), and Highway Patrol (The Goodman). Jen’s plays have been produced internationally in Australia, the UK, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Brazil, Spain, and elsewhere. Books include the debut novel We Play Ourselves (named one of the best books of the year by Buzzfeed; a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), story collection The Island Dwellers (finalist for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize), and new novel There’s Going to be Trouble forthcoming from Random House in April 2024. Jen’s poetry chapbook Bath was selected by Traci Brimhall for Driftwood Press. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Sun, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.  

Silverman is a three-time MacDowell Fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and a Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris. Silverman wrote The Miranda Obsession as a narrative podcast for Audible, starring Rachel Brosnahan. Jen also writes for TV and film, including Tales of the City (Netflix) and Tokyo Vice (HBO/Max). Honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim.