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AlterLab

AlterLab is AlterTheater's new play incubator. 

 

Begun in 2011, AlterLab is a yearlong playwright residency that supports three to five playwrights as they each write a new play. A playwright-empowered residency, AlterLab requires simply that each writer take risks, try something they haven’t done before, challenge themselves, and support their fellow writers. The structure of the residency is determined by the writers each year, based on what they need to accomplish their creative goals.

 

AlterTheater frequently produces and premieres works developed in AlterLab, and occasionally commissions AlterLab playwrights for future productions.



Submissions for AlterLab Cohort 2024-25 will open in April for Bay Area writers only. Please send ten pages of a play, a statement indicating why AlterLab and AlterTheatre would be a good fit for you and your work and a description of the play you would like to write. 

AlterLab Cohort 2023-24

Dylan Chitto

Dillon Chitto is Native American from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and the Pueblos of Laguna and Isleta. Very much a product of his environment he grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he learned the importance of art, culture, and traditions from his family and members of his community. In his playwriting, he connects these ideas using storytelling techniques learned throughout his life. Dillon is presently in Chicago, Illinois and is currently a company member of BoHo Theatre where he is the Literary Manager. His first play Bingo Hall, developed by Native Voices at The Autry and presented during their 2017 Festival of New Plays, was given a world premiere at Native Voices in March 2018 in Los Angeles. He was selected as Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program's 2017 winning playwright. Bingo Hall had a reading presented by the Global Voices theatre project as part of 2019 Origins Festival of First Nations at the British Library in London. He was also featured in the 2019 Adaptation Festival at Theater Above the Law in Chicago, Illinois. Dillon was also awarded Sundance Institute's Uprise Grant in 2022, and Theatre Bay Area's Rella Lossy award for best new script for Pueblo Revolt which premiered at AlterTheater in February 2023.

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linda maria girón

linda maria girón (they/them, elle) is a queer Guatemalan american actor, playwright, musician and visual artist with a passion for gastronomy, drag, poetry and flowers. Plays: amémonos // let us love each other, Memoria del Silencio en el País de la Eterna Primavera, white iris and LIMÃO Y SAL; Devised works: DECOLONIZE YOUR SEX LIFE! (co-writer, Cutting Ball Theater), the site-specific immersive Port Stories (co-writer, Idiot String & Peripatetic Players), and 3GT Investigates: Birth Rights (co-writer, 3 Girls' Theater); Artistic homes: City Street Artists (co-founder), Shotgun Players (2019 M.A.D Fellow, artistic company member), Alter Theater Ensemble, Crowded Fire Theater, Central Works, Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, SFBATCO, Golden Thread Productions, Faultline Theater, Cutting Ball Theater, Town Hall Theater, PlayGround LA/SF and the New Conservatory Theater Center. B.A. Theater & Performance Studies, UC Berkeley. Follow their work: www.lindamgiron.com

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lily gonzales

lily gonzales (they/them) is a writer from San Antonio, based in New York City. Their work has been supported by The John F. Kennedy Center, Colt Coeur, Echo Theater Company (LA), AlterTheater Ensemble, Latinx Playwrights Circle, San Diego REP, Stages, Repertorio Español, and Teatro Vivo. They have been nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, runner-up for 3 Kennedy Center playwriting awards, and a finalist for the Leah Ryan FEWW Prize, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and Miranda Family ‘Voces Latinx’ Competition. B.A UT Austin, Theater & Dance / English.

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Blossom Johnson

Blossom Johnson is a Diné storyteller, playwright, teaching artist and screenwriter. She is from the Yé’ii Dine’é Táchii’nii (Giant People) clan, and her maternal grandfather is from the Deeshchíí’nii (Start of the Red Streak People) clan. When she creates, she writes for her people. In her writing, she reveals truths that are hard to face but she balances the darkness with humor, so the viewer has a chance to breathe and laugh. Blossom was awarded a residency with Willowtail Springs/Durango PlayFest. Additionally, she has been awarded AlterTheater Ensemble's AlterLab 2020-21, the 2022 First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellowship, La Lengua/ AlterTheater Ensemble’s Decolonization Stories Commission 2022, The Playwrights’ Center 2022-2023 Jerome Fellowship, and is proud to be a recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals 2023. Blossom holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University and a BA in Theatre from Arizona State University. A proud member of the Dramatists Guild, and the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA).

Tere Martínez

Tere Martínez is a Puerto Rican playwright and educator who lives in New York City. For the past twenty years, Tere has been an adjunct professor at Hostos Community College (CUNY) in the South Bronx. Her experience teaching a variety of writing and remedial courses led her to develop innovative drama-in-education techniques. She has expanded these techniques into skill-oriented workshops that she conducts in classrooms around New York City.

Tere’s teaching experience has had a profound impact on her playwriting. Her commitment to education has inspired her to write about a wide variety of socially relevant topics, including community organizing, HIV awareness and mental disorders. Her educational plays, Chain Reaction, Nihonjin Face, I Want You By My Side and ...and there’s always the stars..., were each commissioned by theaters or schools. Her print piece, Se valiente...son tus senos, about the importance of breast-cancer detection, was distributed nationwide.

 

Tere’s plays have been produced both in the United States and Puerto Rico by the Puerto Rican Travelling Theater, TeatroStageFest, Broadway Center for the Performing Arts, Hostos Repertory Company, IATI Theater and Pregones, among others. Her theatrical adaptation of When I Was Puerto Rican, and her original plays, Borinquen vive en El Barrio, Mi última noche con Rubén Blades and For Mi Chichí, have toured the United States and Puerto Rico, appearing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, CityParks Theater in New York City, and other locales.

 

Tere’s plays have been studied in Latino studies and literature programs at several universities. Her work has been featured in books and publications about Latino theater in the United States. Tere’s awards include Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting (HOLA) 2008, Distinguished Educator of the Year (Hostos Community College) 2010 and a 2011 NYSCA Playwriting Grant.

Tere received her M.A. in Educational Theater from New York University, and is a member of The Dramatists Guild of America.

Beth Piatote

Beth Piatote is a scholar of Native American/Indigenous literature and law; a creative writer of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays; and an Indigenous language revitalization activist/healer, specializing in Nez Perce language and literature. She is the author of two books: Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which won an MLA award; and The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Award. Her current projects include a series of scholarly essays on Indigenous law through sensory representations of sound, vision, synaesthesia, and haunting in the long 20th century literary works; essays on Indigenous language revitalization; a novel, a poetry collection, and further development of her play, Antíkoni, which was selected for the 2020 Festival of New Plays at the Autry. She has held several artist residencies and frequently teaches writing at Fishtrap: Writing and the West and other workshops. In 2021, she will serve as a judge for the PEN America/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.

 

Beth is part of the core faculty group that created the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization (established in 2018) and currently serves as Chair of the DE. She earned her PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University and joined the Berkeley faculty in 2007. In 2020, she joined the Comparative Literature department; she holds a dual appointment in Comparative Literature and Native American Studies. She is affiliated faculty in the Department of Linguistics; Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies; and American Studies. Beth is Nez Perce, enrolled with Colville Confederated Tribes. In addition to her research and teaching, she is involved in ongoing efforts to repatriate ancestors from museums as part of a larger movement of reparation and redress. She currently serves on the international Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

Josie Seid

Josie Seid is an all-around storyteller who is active in several aspects of theater making; working as an actor/singer, director, playwright and teacher/coach of character development for acting and playwriting.

 

She is a proud member of the LineStorm Playwrights collective as well as the ART Playwrights group, Squabble and Throb.  Most recently, Anonymous Theater produced her collaborative work with fellow LineStorm playwright, Sara Jean Accuardi; Fezziwig's Fortune in December of 2022. She has produced several works in partnership with Linestorm: For their Portland in Play 2016 and 2017 productions, she wrote the short plays Jordan’s Wisdom and The Portland Colored School: A Lesson in Reading Between the Lines.  She also wrote the short play, Overdue for the Short and Sweet short play festival in 2017. Her plays This is Message 13 and Stand By Me have been featured in Profile Theater’s 24 hour short play festivals in 2017 and 2018. Her play, The Great God of the Dark Storm Cloud was featured in the 2018 Fertile Ground Festival and her play Petite Dames was highlighted by both the Reading Parlor and 2017 Fertile Ground and was a Kilroy List nominee. Josie’s short play, A Wing and a Prayer was recently featured in the nationwide Play At Home project. Another short, The Thing About Lighthouses has been included in the LineStorm produced, short play and monologue anthology, Go Play Outside. Her short film, Being Me in the Current America is a multiple award winner in festivals around the world. 

 

Never one to run from a challenge, she recently participated in a songwriting master class with Tony award winner William Finn and has a song featured in Shaking the Tree’s production of Forbidden Fruit which ran in March of 2023 in Portland, OR.

 

She is also a resident artist with Artists Repertory Theatre and has performed in shows on Portland area stages such as: Hester Smith in Shaking the Tree's production of Fucking A, Jack’s Mother in Into the Woods, the ensemble of Hairspray and Trix the Aviatrix in the Drowsy Chaperone all with Broadway Rose.  She also brought Lola to life in the world premiere Cottonwood in the Flood as part of the Vanport Mosiac Festival.  Some of her favorite roles include Viney in the Miracle Worker and Dido in An Octoroon, both with Artists Rep.  The Soothsayer in Portland Actors Ensembles production of Antony and Cleopatra. She has also had the honor of bringing new work to life, participating in readings for Alan's Confectionary, and My Walk Has Never Been Average in Portland's Fertile Ground Festival.  Concert credits include The Billie Holiday Tribute Concert held at the Alberta Rose theater and Portland Sings with Artist’s Rep.  Additionally, Josie is an international arts envoy for the United States and has performed in both Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, representing the United States in the International CIFCET Theater Festival.

 

Josie has also directed productions in Portland including two world premieres: Hazardous Beauty with PassinArt and A Dark Sky Full of Stars with Vertigo. Her most recent film, Forget Me Not, America, in association with the ART Mercury company has taken Josie to new creative places and she is excited to imagine what’s next!

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