Five Diverse Artists Bring Their Talents To The Ensemble Of The New York Neo-Futurists

Co-artistic directors Rob Neill and Kyra Sims and the award-winning New York Neo-Futurists (NYNF), a diverse collective of writer-director-performers now in their 18th season of writing and performing original work rooted in non-fiction, announce the expanding of the ensemble with five new artists: Jake Banasiewicz, Rudy Ramirez, Chan Lin, Jackson Bird, and Mike Manship. These new Neo-Futurists will start working with the company immediately and will each have initial individual five-week runs in The Infinite Wrench at the Kraine Theater (85 East 4th Street, NYC) now through August of 2022. Photos of the actors here.

"We are thrilled to have such smart, dynamic and deeply engaging individuals join our company. These five new ensemble members have already breathed such new artistic energy into the ensemble, and they are just getting started", says Sims. "We are excited to welcome these five vibrant artists to the company, and we look forward to the new plays, new collaborations, and the evolution of what we all do together", adds Neill.

Jake Banasiewicz (he/him) is a NYC-based actor/playwright originally from North Carolina. Jake graduated with a BFA in Acting from Marymount Manhattan College in 2019. As an actor, Jake has been seen in the immersive show ZeroSpace and Makes Sense Theatric's Imagination Row. As a playwright, Jake's play Blinking, Or The What Play was presented at Dixon Place in February 2019 and his play F!SH T@C0 was presented virtually by First Kiss Theatre in 2021.

Rudy Ramirez (they/them) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist, writer, arts educator, and facilitator. Ramirez is a lead teaching artist with Ping Chong + Company and has served similarly at other organizations like Seattle Children's Theatre, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Childsplay, Center for Arts Education, and others. As a performer, Rudy is a member of Actors' Equity, and has performed across the US in various regional and touring productions. Most recently, they served as Co-Consulting Director of Antiracism Initiatives for Theatre for Young Audiences/USA. Additionally, they were a founding member of the BIPOC in TYA Advisory Board, project curator for Anti-Racist & Anti-Oppressive Futures for Theatre for Young Audiences: An Interactive Guide, and also authored its subsequent Accountability Report. They are a member of Theatre CG's 2021 Rising Leaders of Color NYC Cohort. Rudy is an Arizona transplant and Arizona State University alum.

Chan Lin (she/her) is a Fujianese-American multimedia artist living in Queens, NY. As a queer first generation immigrant from China who spent much of her childhood in rural Florida, Chan believes in advocating for and sharing the narratives of underrepresented voices. Since graduating from NYU in 2013, Chan has worked in film and television as a graphic designer and is a member of United Scenic Artists Local 829. She is also a ceramic artist, a matchmaker for the queer community, and a cyclist. Whether she is working in design, photography, theater, writing, or clay, she creates with a keen awareness of race, place, history, and language.

Jackson Bird (he/him) is a writer and internet creator whose work revolves primarily around transgender advocacy and the pursuit of offbeat knowledge. A TED Resident and GLAAD Rising Star Digital Innovator, Jackson is also the host of the daily podcast Cool Stuff Ride Home. In addition to sharing his and others' stories on YouTube for the past fifteen years and serving as a YouTube Creator In Residence, Jackson pivoted to slow media in 2019 with his debut book, Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Vulture, The Advocate, and more. Jackson is a former nonprofit communications director and current Senior Fellow with the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Raised in Texas, Jackson has spent over a decade in Queens, where he hosts weekly pub quizzes and grows too many plants on his patio.

Mike Manship (he/him) is a writer / performer originally from Raleigh, NC, where he began his career improvising with ComedySportz. He has since performed with Zeitgeist Stage, Flat Earth Theatre, and Ghosts and Gravestones Tours (Boston); and with the Neo-Futurists, Barrel of Monkeys, Redmoon, and The Factory Theatre (Chicago, IL). As a writer, he is co-creator of the hit Boston show T: An MBTA Musical and the faux children's parody series The "What Ever Happened to . . ." Series (For the Young and Easily Influenced). In 2014, his short play, Card Trick, was accepted as one of eight winners from over a hundred submissions to The Goodman Theatre's New Play Bake-Off, and from 2016-2018, he served as the resident playwright for the Chicago-area company, Theatre-Hikes. His first novel, Cambridge Street, is available on Amazon.

The New York Neo-Futurists are a radically dynamic ensemble of multidisciplinary artists who write and perform original work rooted in the truth of our own lived experiences. We fuse elements of poetry, game, and performance art to create ever-changing theater and other artistic experiments to respond to the world around us. Since opening in Brooklyn in 2004 the New York Neo-Futurists have premiered over 6,000 plays and have become a downtown New York institution. In addition to performing The Infinite Wrench fifty weeks a year and producing Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind from 2004 until 2016, the New York Neo-Futurists have been a stalwart presence in the Off-Off Broadway community, having won numerous Innovative Theatre Awards and Drama Desk Nominations. The company was honored at The 2018 Fresh Fruit Festival Awards with the Honeyberry Award for Unrecognized Service to the LGBT Community. The Infinite Wrench unleashes a barrage of two-minute plays and while each one offers something different, be it funny, profound, elegant, disgusting, topical, irrelevant, or terrifying, all are truthful and tackle the here-and-now, inspired by the lived experiences of the performers.