
New York, NY - Sundance Institute today announced the seven artists selected for the 2016 Playwrights & Composers Retreat at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, February 1-19. The retreat is one of the 25 residency Labs the Institute hosts each year for independent artists in theatre, film, new media and episodic content, and is made possible through the generosity of the Ucross Foundation. Over 90 Sundance artists have benefitted from time at Ucross Foundation including Charlayne Woodard, Jeanine Tesori, Doug Wright, Annie Baker, Adam Guettel, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Tanya Saracho.
Under the supervision of Artistic Director Philip Himberg and Producing Director Christopher Hibma, the 18-day writing colony will support five emerging and established playwrights and two theatre composers will begin developing new work. Sundance Institute dramaturg, Mame Hunt, will be on hand to respond to new pages. The retreat provides Fellows with an environment of peer mentorship, professional growth and uninhibited creativity.
Himberg said, For 16 years, our Playwrights & Composers Retreat at Ucross Foundation has provided a rare opportunity for theatre-makers at different stages of their careers to convene and share stories. In the unique Wyoming landscape, writers find time and inspiration to begin new work or refine works in progress.
The artists selected for the 2016 Playwrights & Composers Retreat at Ucross Foundation are:
Heather Christian (Composer)
Heather Christian is an Obie Award winning composer/performer for Mission Drift (Nat'l Theater London), The World Is Round (BAM), Annie Salem (Ars Nova/Sundance Institute Theatre Lab) as well as the film, Gregory Go Boom (Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize). She teaches an Atelier at Princeton University and was named a TimeOut NY Downtown Innovator To Watch. Primarily a songstress with her band, the Arbornauts,she has released four records and can be seen all over the world avant-torching.
Michael R. Jackson (Composer)
Michael R. Jackson holds a BFA and MFA in Playwriting and Musical Theatre Writing from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. He wrote the book, music and lyrics for the musical A Strange Loop and wrote the book and lyrics for the musical Only Children with composer Rachel Peters. He is currently writing the book and lyrics for the musical adaptation of the 2007 comedy horror film Teeth with composer Anna Jacobs.
Tony Meneses (Playwright)
Tony Meneses is a Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab member and resident playwright in the Ars Nova Play Group. His play Guadalupe in the Guest Room had its world premiere at Two River Theater and is now published by Dramatists Play Service. Previously a Playwrights Realm Writing fellow and developed at the LARK Playwrights' Week; he's also the recipient of the 2010 Kennedy Center ACTF Latino Playwriting Award.
A. Rey Pamatmat (Playwright)
A. Rey Pamatmat's play, House Rules, will premiere at Ma-Yi Theatre this Spring. Recently, Boston celebrated his work with the Huntington and Company One Theatres concurrently presenting after all the terrible things I do and Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them in the Calderwood Pavilion. Other recent plays: Thunder Above, Deeps Below and A Power Play, Or, What's-its-name. Rey is Co-Director of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab and was a PoNY, Hodder, and NYFA Fellow.
Andrew Schneider (Playwright)
Andrew Schneider is an OBIE award-winning performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Schneider creates and performs original performance works, builds interactive electronic art works and installations and was a Wooster Group company member from 2007-2014. Andrew's original performance work in NYC includes the OBIE award winning YOUARENOWHERE, DANCE/FIELD, TIDAL and WOW+FLUTTER among others. Andrew holds a Masters Degree in Interactive Telecommunications from NYU.
Lucy Thurber (Playwright)
Lucy Thurber's theater homes are the Rattlestick Playwright's Theater, The Atlantic Theater, and Labyrinth Theater. She won an OBIE for her five play cycle The Hill Town Plays.Lucy wrote the text for Quixote, conceived and directed by Lear deBessonet, a site-specific performance with the Psalters made with The Broad Street Community. Thurber is an alumni of New Dramatists, a member of 13P, Labyrinth Theater Company and Rising Phoenix Rep. She is a proud recipient of a LILLY AWARD.
Bridgette A. Wimberly (Playwright)
Bridgette A. Wimberly has been commissioned and produced by several theaters Off-Broadway and across the country. She is the Founding Artistic Director of From Breast Cancer to Broadway, presenting short plays by breast cancer survivors on stage to empower, educate and motivate women to be more proactive about their breast health and save lives. She wrote the libretto for the critically acclaimed opera, Charlie Parker's Yardbird, scheduled for production in Chicago, Milwaukee and New York.
The Sundance Institute Theatre Program is supported by an endowment from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, with generous additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Time Warner Foundation; Perry and Martin Granoff; LUMA Foundation; the John and Marcia Price Family Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; The Shubert Foundation, Inc.; Wendy vanden Heuvel; The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust; Karen Lauder; and Joan and George Hornig.
Sundance Institute
Founded in 1981 by Robert Redford, Sundance Institute is a nonprofit organization that provides and preserves the space for artists in film, theatre, and new media to create and thrive. The Institutes signature Labs, granting, and mentorship programs, dedicated to developing new work, take place throughout the year in the U.S. and internationally. The Sundance Film Festival and other public programs connect audiences to artists
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...