Nashville Rep Announces 2016/17 Ingram New Works Lab Playwright

The Ingram New Works Project is proud to announce its Ingram New Works Lab Playwrights for the 2016/17 season.

Part of the Ingram New Works Project, the Ingram New Works Lab is an artistic home for playwrights who will each develop a brand new play during their year-long residency in Nashville. Selected from a highly competitive pool of national applicants, the Lab Playwrights are a dynamic cohort of early-career artists that become part of the Nashville community as they develop their plays. At the end of the Residency, Lab Playwrights have become a vibrant part of the Nashville Arts ecosystem, have developed a muscular new play from its earliest stages to presentation in front of an engaged audience, and are ready to springboard themselves into the next exciting phase of their writing career.

Martha R. Ingram, Nashville Rep co-founder and strong supporter of the Ingram New Works Project, notes, "I am confident that the Ingram New Works Project will not only have positive contributions to the Nashville theatre community, but also the American theatre landscape as a whole."

The Ingram New Works Lab playwrights will be joined by this year's Ingram New Works Fellow, Christopher Durang, who will also be developing a new play while in residence during the 2016/17 season.

This season, The Ingram New Works Project welcomes Gabrielle Reisman, Andrew Rosendorf, Stacy Osei-Kuffour, and Nashville Rep Playwright-in-Residence Nate Eppler. Complete bios for the Ingram New Works Lab playwrights can be found below.

"Each of these playwrights has a unique and dynamic voice, not to mention unmistakable talent" says playwright-in-residence and Ingram New Works Project Director Nate Eppler. "This combination of voices isn't just a snapshot of where strong storytelling is at the moment, but where we can go next. I can't wait to share their plays with you at the 2017 Ingram New Works Festival. If you haven't joined us yet, this is the year to get connected."

The Ingram New Works Project culminates in the Ingram New Works Festival, a celebration of the new plays developed in the program that season. The plays are performed as staged readings with professional Nashville actors and are an opportunity for Nashville audiences to be a part of this exciting process. This season's festival is slated to run May 10-20, 2017.

Nashville Rep's Ingram New Works Project was created with the support of co-founder Martha R. Ingram to provide an opportunity for theatre artists to develop new theatre works while in residency at Nashville Rep.

The Ingram New Works Project is a locally valued and nationally recognized new play development program that cultivates and amplifies new voices for the stage and expands the creative capacity of Nashville by connecting artists and audiences across extraordinary new works.

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHTS:

GABRIELLE REISMAN is a playwright and director based in New York and New Orleans. She is a founding member of Underbelly, a theatre collaborative that stages immersive journey-plays in forgotten spaces, and is the director of new play incubator Brooklyn Yard. Gabi is a Core Writer with the Playwrights Center, a Page 73 Writers Group alum, MacDowell Colony fellow, and former NNPN Playwright in Residence at Southern Rep. Her play, Catch The Wall made The Kilroys Top 46 List, was developed with the NOLA Project, Sundance Theatre Lab, and Great Plains Theatre Conference Mainstage, and won the Holland New Voices Award and the KCACTF Rosa Parks Award. Flood City was developed through Clubbed Thumb/Playwright Horizons SuperLab and premiered with the NOLA Project this fall. Gabi Has also developed work with the Orchard Project, the Lark, and New Victory LabWorks among others, and produced plays in train stations, warehouses, and defunct churches across the country. With the Ingram New Works Lab, she'll develop Pattern Seeking Animals, an EST/Sloan Project commission about the Louisiana coast. MFA: UT Austin.

"I'm so thrilled to write Pattern Seeking Animals through the Ingram New Works Lab! Nate Eppler is an intuitive advocate for new plays and the Lab's unique structure is sure to produce some great work." - Gabrielle Reisman

ANDREW ROSENDORF is currently a 2016-2017 McKnight Fellow in Playwriting at The Playwrights' Center. His plays includeCane (Florida Stage), Brilliant Corners (NNPN National Showcase of New Plays), Paper Cut, Good Night & God Bless, or The Lone Ranger Rides Again, and The Kid. His play, Tranquil, was part of the Lark's Playwrights' Week and will premiere at Luna Stage in Spring 2017. His other work has been produced or developed at La Jolla, MCC, the National New Play Network, American Theater Company, City Theatre, Geva Theatre, Actor's Express, Palm Beach Dramaworks, UglyRhino, and Tofte Lake Center. Andrew is an alum of terraNOVA Collective's Groundbreakers Playwrights Group and NNPN's Playwright-in-Residence program. He has been a Jerome Fellow at The Playwrights' Center as well as a VCCA and MacDowell Colony Fellow. MFA: The New School for Drama, Playwriting. andrewrosendorf.com

"I'm extremely excited to be joining the Ingram New Works Lab. It's an incredibly unique program across the country that offers playwrights artistic support throughout an entire season. It is a lab in every sense of the word. I get to work with Nashville Rep & my cohort - my playwright peers - to explore, to investigate, to experiment - and fail. All in service of the growth of our plays as well as ourselves as artists." - Andrew Rosendorf

STACY OSEI-KUFFOUR was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Previous plays include: The Painter (finalist at Samuel French Festival), Breathless (Dream Up Festival, Downtown Urban Theater Festival), Dirty Blood (a reading at Rattlestick Theater),Animals (won the Irv Zarkower Award and had a reading at the Lark Development Center, New York Theatre Workshop and IAMA Theatre), The Pearl and The Black Sea (received an Honorable Mention in The Kilroy's for Best New Plays By Women). Stacy is a member of Chicks with Scripts, EST's New West Playwriting Group, and was recently accepted into New Georges The Jam! BFA: New York University, Drama // MFA: Hunter College, Playwriting

"I am so excited to have been awarded the amazing opportunity to be a part of the Ingram New Works Lab. For several years I have been writing searching for a home, a safe place where I can work alongside talented, fierce artists who want to make a difference in this world through writing as much as I do. I'm happy to say that I have finally found that home with the Ingram." - Stacy Osei-Kuffour

Nate Eppler is a playwright and Arts Advocate currently serving as Playwright-in-Residence for Nashville Repertory Theatre. While in residence at Nashville Rep, Mr. Eppler has developed plays including Long Way Down (3Ps Productions, Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award semi-finalist 2011), Larries (Nashville Repertory Theatre 2013), Good Monsters (Nashville Repertory Theatre 2016) and The Ice Treatment (GPTC 2016, Actors Bridge Ensemble 2016) Mr. Eppler is a vocal advocate for new artists and new works in the American theatre with an emphasis on developing the creative capacity of his adopted hometown of Nashville. In addition to his work as a playwright, Mr. Eppler serves as Director of the Nashville Repertory Theatre Ingram New Works Project, a nationally recognized and locally valued program designed to cultivate the development of new plays for the stage. Mr. Eppler is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America. nateeppler.com

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