Igniting Wonder: Plays for Preschoolers

CONTRIBUTORS

128 ELISSA ADAMS is director of new play development at Children’s Theatre Company, where she has overseen the commissioning and development of more than twenty new plays since 1998, including Esperanza Rising, Brooklyn Bridge, Once Upon a Forest, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Reeling, Five Fingers of Funk, Snapshot Silhouette, Korczak’s Children, and Anon(ymous). She received a McKnight Foundation Theater Artist Fellowship, is a frequent guest dramaturg at the Sundance Theatre Lab, and has served on numerous panels for Theatre Communications Group. PETER BROSIUS has been artistic director of Children’s Theatre Company since 1997. Under his leadership, CTC established Threshold, a new play laboratory that has created world premiere productions with leading American playwrights. He directed the world premieres of Bert and Ernie, Goodnight!, Iqbal, Iron Ring, Madeline and the Gypsies, Average Family, The Lost Boys of Sudan, Anon(ymous), Reeling, The Monkey King, Hansel and Gretel, The Snow Queen, and Mississippi Panorama, all commissioned and workshopped in Threshold. He has received numerous awards, including Theatre Communications Group’s Alan Schneider Director Award and honors from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and Dramalogue. CONTRIBUTORS Contributors 129 BARRY KORNHAUSER spearheads the Family Arts Collaborative at Millersville University. Previously he served as playwright-inresidence and director of theatre for young audiences at the National Historic Landmark Fulton Theatre. He received the Chorpenning Cup, honoring “a body of distinguished work by a nationally known writer of outstanding plays for children.” Other accolades include the Twin Cities’ Ivey Award for Playwriting (for Reeling at CTC), the Helen Hayes Outstanding Play Award (Cyrano), two American Alliance for Theatre and Education (AATE) Distinguished Play Awards (This Is Not a Pipe Dream and Balloonacy), and the Bonderman Prize (Worlds Apart).He has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, TYA/USA, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Pennsylvania Performing Artists on Tour (PennPAT). In 2008, his Youtheatre program for at-risk and disabled teens was recognized at the White House as one of the nation’s top arts-education initiatives, and he received the AATE’s 2011 Youth Theatre Director of the Year Award for his work with this ensemble. 130 Contributors FABRIZIO MONTECCHI is a director and set designer who was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and now lives and works in Piacenza. Since 1978 he has worked with Teatro Gioco Vita, developing contemporary shadow puppet theatre. He has collaborated with La Scala di Milano, La Fenice di Venezia, l’Arena di Verona, il Teatro Regio di Torino, il Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, l’Aterballetto di Reggio Emilia, and il Piccolo Teatro de Milano. He has designed and directed workshops in Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden. He has published books on shadow theatre and has taught at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette de Charleville-Mézières (France), Turku Arts Academy (Finland), and Akademia Teatralna de Bialystok (Poland). ROSANNA STAFFA was born in Italy and first wrote for the stage with a translation of the work of Dario Fo. Her plays have been performed in the Mark Taper Forum’s Taper Too and the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles; at Soho Rep and Off-Broadway at St. Clement’s Theatre in New York; and at the Playwrights’ Center and the Theatre Garage in Minneapolis. The Innocence of Ghosts won the AT&T OnStage Award and has been filmed for the permanent collection of the Lincoln Center Library on Film Collection. She is a McKnight Advancement Contributors 131 Grant recipient, a former Jerome Fellow, and a core member of the Playwrights’ Center. Her play Ada, commissioned by the Guthrie Theater, was produced at Seattle Rep’s Women Playwrights Festival in partnership with Hedgebrook retreat for women writers. VICTORIA STEWART received her MFA from the University of Iowa. Her plays include 800 Words (Workhaus Collective, Hourglass Group, Live Girls! Theater); LIVE GIRLS (Urban Stages, WHAT, Stage Left Theatre); Hardball (Summer Play Festival, Live Girls! Theater); Leitmotif (South Coast Repertory, Page 73); Nightwatches (Overlap Productions); Acclimate (Commonweal Theatre); The Last Scene; and an adaptation of Henry James’s The Bostonians. She has received the Francesca Primus Prize, a McKnight Advancement Grant, the Helen Merrill Award, and the Jerome Fellowship. She collaborated on FISSURES (lost and found), produced at the 2010 Humana Festival. Her play Rich Girl...