The Reading Room Festival 2023

Director Of Programming and Artistic Director, Folger Theatre

Lauren M. Gunderson has been one of the most produced playwrights in America since 2015, topping the list thrice including 2022/23. She is a two-time winner of the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award for I and You and The Book of Will, the winner of the Lanford Wilson Award and a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She is a playwright, screenwriter, musical book writer and children’s author who lives in San  Francisco. She graduated from NYU Tisch as a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. LaurenGunderson.com 

Al Letson is a playwright, screenwriter, actor and journalist. Letson hosts Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting, an award winning news program heard on over 500 NPR stations and over 1 million podcast downloads a month. As a journalist he’s been awarded three Peabodys and an Emmy.  His theater work has appeared Off Broadway and on stages across the country. Letson has written for several television shows with various networks including AMC, APPLE TV, and HULU. He continues to write, develop and tell new stories, for both broadcast and live audiences. Alletson.com 

Emily Lyon is a director, dramaturg, and artistic director that carves out the humor and authenticity in new and classic texts. She co-created, leads, and curates Expand the Canon––a call to action to include a wide range of historic women and gender-expansive writers in the canon of classics––as Artistic Director. As a freelance director, Lyon has directed nine world premieres, including Diana Ly’s Sex and the Abbey (The Brick), and has worked with the Folger Theatre, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Geva Theatre, the Old Globe, LaMaMa, Yale Rep, the Royal Shakespeare Company, University of Michigan, and others. As a dramaturg, she’s worked with writers on shaping over 25 new plays, including the world premiere of Kate Hamill’s Sense & Sensibility, and editing classical texts, including the Expand the Canon plays and The Tempest for Shakespeare in the Park. Find out more at EmilyALyon.com, and ExpandTheCanon.com. 

Reynaldo Piniella (he/him) is an actor, writer, activist and educator from East New York, Brooklyn. In 2021, he was in the acting company of two Broadway shows at the same time: Thoughts of a Colored Man and Trouble in Mind. His Off-Broadway acting credits include work at Signature Theatre Company, the Public Theater, the Working Theater, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA), and Rattlestick Theater, regionally with Baltimore Center Stage, Syracuse Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Cleveland Play House, NY Stage and Film, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, and Actors Theatre of Louisville, and internationally with the Sundance Theatre Lab in Morocco and NEAP Fest in Rio de Janeiro. TV credits include Reservation Dogs, Sneaky Pete, Law & Order: SVU, The Carrie Diaries, Flesh & Bone, Blue Bloods, Greenleaf, Louie, NYC 22, Us & Them, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Film: Madeline’s Madeline (Sundance Film Fest, Showtime), Shadows (HBO Max) and Broken City (20th Century FOX). His co-created bilingual Spanish-English Hamlet has been developed at Folger Theatre, the Public Theater, the Classical Theatre of Harlem, and the Acting Company. He is an alum of New Victory Theater’s LabWorks, All for One Theater’s Solo Collective, the Civilians’ R&D Group, and a former Artist-in-Residence at Hi-ARTS, the cell theatre, Abingdon Theatre Company, and Culture Lab LIC. He has received fellowships from Theatre Communications Group, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, Weeksville Heritage Center, and the All Stars Project. @ReynaldoRey. www.reynaldopiniella.com  www.reynaldopiniella.com

Actor-writer-musician Malik Work is a founding member of The Real Live Show, a groundbreaking music conglomerate known for bringing the NYC jazz and hip hop communities together for albums, events, and projects that transformed the culture of both.

Nicole Brewer is a proud member of SDC.  She is critically aware of the impact of racism in the industry and centers her directing practice in anti-racism. Directing credits: The Winter’s Tale at Shakespeare Theatre’s Academy of Classical Acting, Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror at Baltimore Center Stage and The Long Wharf as well as numerous projects as a guest director at colleges and universities across North America. Ms. Brewer is on faculty in the acting department at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. She earned her M.F.A. in Acting from Northern Illinois University and her B.F.A. from Howard University.  Nicole shares her anti-racist theatre approach to theaters and institutions all over the country, Canada and the UK. Nicole is a proud mother of three. She is grateful for her community whose support allows her to continue to pursue her artistic bliss. 

Eddie DeHais is a Franco-American transgender director, choreographer, writer, and visual artist. Raised bi-culturally between New York and France, Eddie works internationally in theater and opera, reimagining classics and developing new plays, musicals, and operas. They create epic, transformational, visceral experiences that catalyze fierce compassion and vulnerable curiosity across all boundaries. Recent work includes working as the Choreographic and Intimacy Consultant at the Paris Opera Bastille on their new production of Salome, a workshop at the Seattle Rep of the musical Here & Their, and a workshop centered on disability and blindness of Charlie German’s Happy Birthday Jay, You C*nt at the 14st Y. Upcoming work includes their own original translation and adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas at Book-It Repertory Theater, Hedwig at ArtsWest, The Merry Wives of Windsor at Seattle Shakespeare, and directing for the web-series Dirty Jew, filming in NYC. They also were recently awarded a grant from the San Diego Opera to develop an original adaptation of Metropolis. Eddie has their MFA in Directing from Brown University.

Devin E. Haqq (Ambition’s Debt) is an Emmy nominated producer, a member of the Fiasco Theater Acting Company, an IFP alumni, and a Finalist for the HBOAccess 2020 Directing Fellowship. His feature film, Ambition’s Debt, won the 2017 Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature at the prestigious American Black Film Festival (ABFF) and the 2018 Paul Robeson Award Honorable Mention at the Newark Black Film Festival. Recently, Devin produced the short film Cupids, directed by Zoey Martinson, which had its world premiere at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival as part of the 8:46 Films Initiative sponsored by Procter & Gamble (2022 NAACP Image Award Nominee). Cupids has since gone on to play at some of the top film festivals around the world, including Woodstock, Cambridge, Chicago International Film Festival (Gold Hugo Award Nominee), Riverrun, The American Pavilion at Cannes, and recently aired on CBS & BET networks. 

Tatiana Pandiani is director-choreographer who works in English and Spanish. Originally from Buenos Aires, she grew up around milongas, antique stores and dance studios. She studied Performance and Philosophy at Florida International University and Directing at Columbia University. Her work combines live performance, dance, and music to challenge and entertain; it is inspired Maria Irene Fornes, Frida Kahlo, Pina Bausch, Bob Fosse, Bertol Brecht, and Astor Piazzola. She serves as the Associate Director for the First National Broadway tour of What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck which recently closed on Broadway. Tatiana directed the international tour of La Negrophilie by Zakiya Markland at the Frank Collymore Hall in Barbados, the Ubumuntu Arts Festival in Rwanda and the Kampala International Theatre Festival in Uganda. Tatiana has served at director-choreographer and co-book writer for the ongoing development on the bilingual musical AZUL at the National Alliance of Musical Theatre (NAMT), the National Music Theatre Conference at the O’Neill, Tofte Lake Center, New York Theatre Workshop, BRIC, The Drama League and many others. www.tatianapandiani.com