Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition: 2019/2020
Winner: Steph Del Rosso
53% Of
Steph Del Rosso is a playwright, fiction writer, screenwriter, and educator. Her Alliance/Kendeda award-winning play 53% Of received its world premiere Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theater in 2022 and is published by Concord Theatricals. Her work has been produced or developed at The Public, La Jolla Playhouse, Studio Theatre, The Kennedy Center, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, JACK, Ojai Playwrights' Conference, Cape Cod Theatre Project, and others. She is a winner of the Steinberg Playwright Award and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction, a Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center, and a 2023/2024 New Georges Audrey Resident. Artist fellowships include: MacDowell (upcoming), the Bogliasco Foundation (upcoming), the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay. She lives in Brooklyn. www.stephdelrosso.com
Logan Faust
Unkindness
Logan Faust is a Louisiana-born playwright, television writer, and actor who holds his Master of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing from NYU Tisch. Before moving to New York, he lived in New Orleans, where he received his BA in Theatre Arts from Loyola University New Orleans. His play Unkindness is a finalist for the Alliance Theatre's Kendeda Prize, and he currently works as a Writers PA for Filthy Rich, airing on FOX in January 2020.
Ava Geyer
Monster
Ava Geyer is a playwright and screenwriter based in Brooklyn, NY. She's a 2023 resident of SPACE on Ryder Farm, a member of Obie-winning writers group EST/Youngblood and under commission by La Jolla Playhouse. Past honors include Theater Masters' Visionary Award (2020) and Shank Residency at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater ('19-'20). She writes about tech, economics, sex, and female consciousness. Aaron Sorkin with a feminist heart. Plays include Monster (finalist, Alliance/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Competition), B-Storm (pub. by Concord Theatricals; winner, National MFA Playwrights Festival), Death Cleaning (Bloodworks Reading Series '23) and Fruit Snacks ("Hopeful Decade" event, Williamsburg, BK). Ava is an Artist Advocate for Healing TREE, a mental health nonprofit dedicated to promoting trauma-focused therapy. Generally regarded as the most promising young writer to emerge from her Crown Heights apartment. MFA: UC San Diego '19. BA: Princeton University '15.
Cary Simowitz
Djarum Vanilla
Cary Simowitz (He/Him/His) is a playwright and lawyer hailing from Coral Springs, Florida, currently serving as the Dramatists Guild Regional Ambassador for St. Louis. He recently graduated from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television with his Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting. He is the author of five full-length plays, three one acts, and several ten minute pieces, in addition to multiple works of poetry and short fiction. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English and Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2013. Following undergraduate school, he received his Juris Doctor from Washington University School of Law in 2016, and is licensed to practice law in Missouri and New York.
Cary’s plays have collectively garnered him modest recognition in over two-dozen competitions across the country. His play, Djarum Vanilla, was developed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC in August of 2018 as part of their MFA New Play Festival. It went on to receive the Kennedy Center’s 2019 Rosa Parks Award for “Distinguished Achievement,” and was developed at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta Georgia as a 2019-2020 Alliance/Kendeda finalist play. It was later incorporated into the middle school English literature curriculum at the KIPP School in the Bronx. His UCLA thesis play, A Wolf’s Mother, was produced at UCLA as part of its 2019 MFA New Play Festival, and was subsequently given a workshop production at the Garage Theater in Long Beach, California, as a winner of Panndora Production’s 12th Annual New Works Festival. His most recent project, All the Oxytocin in Your Fingertips, which explores Deaf Culture in American society, was a finalist in the 2019 Tennessee Williams/ New Orleans Literary Festival. It achieved finalist status in the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s 2020 and 2021 National Playwrights Conference, and was the Grand Prize winning play at the 2021 FutureFest New Play Festival.
Inna Tsyrlin
Stitched with a Sickle and a Hammer
Inna Tsyrlin’s work responds to society’s responsibility to the natural environment, ideas of political freedom through the lens of historical and current events, and identity in a diaspora. She received a Graduate Fellowship (Ohio University) for Stitched with a Sickle and a Hammer, and the play was the 2019 Renaissance Theaterworks New Play Festival finalist (Milwaukee, WI) and 2020 Alliance/Kendeda Playwriting Competition finalist (Atlanta, GA). Her work has been presented in New York City at The Rising Sun Performance Company (Tattoo on My Arm), Emerging Artists Theater, HB Playwrights Theatre, and Manhattan Repertory Theater. She holds a MFA in Playwriting (Ohio University) and is a member of the Dramatist Guild.
