St. John’s Theatre

Emily Davis is an actor and writer from Dallas, Texas. She has worked with theatre company Half Straddle for 15 years, creating original work and performing in New York and abroad. She recently made her Broadway debut portraying whistleblower Reality Winner in their original production Is This A Room. Television credits include The Patient, Tulsa King, American Rust, Servant, and High Maintenance. Film credits include The Plagiarists, Moon v. State, The Puzzlers, LOOPHOLE, White Wedding, and Cryptozoo.

Jane Deasy is a composer and performer working across theatre, multimedia, and electroacoustic music. She builds custom instruments and designs – composition, staging, and performance are interconnected in her work. In 2022, Jane's most recent work for stage Opening Night, a noise cabaret and an experiment in live slowness, premiered at Dublin Fringe Festival winning the award for Best Design. Her first musical theatre piece KAPERLAK also premiered at Dublin Fringe in 2016. Commissions and performances include Open Ear – a festival of Irish experimental and underground music on Sherkin Island, New Music Dublin at the National Concert Hall, and Alternating Current by Dublin Digital Radio. She studied Music and Theatre at Trinity College Dublin before continuing to an M.A. at the Glasgow School of Art in 2017. In 2018 she received the Arts Council Next Generation Award and since then has been funded through the Arts Council bursary and project awards. She has a tiny label releasing interdisciplinary collaborations called Sympathetic Resonance. Jane is in a dream punk sonic poetry band called The Hermettes. “The overall effect is both alien and beautiful, mysterious and generous, welcoming and overwhelming” - Ian Maleney, The Winter Papers. 

Gabriel Graves was born in Spain, lived in Argentina, and now resides in Ireland. Among other things, he is a playwright and a director. He has premiered more than 20 plays, with the last two taking the stage in Ireland – one as a co-director and the other as a playwright/director. He proudly supports Club Atlético Boca Juniors.

Amanda Horowitz (B. 1991, Washington, DC) is an interdisciplinary artist working between performance and sculpture. She writes and directs theater projects with experimental and collaborative methods. Past performance projects include: Heavenly Fools (Mason Gross Playwrights Festival, 2023), Bad Stars (2023, STARS Gallery), Bad Water True West (2022, Bad Water Gallery), Keys to The Round House (2021, Rutgers University), Suddenly, This Summer (2019, PAM), and The Plumbing Tree (co-written & directed with Bully Fae Collins, 2018-19, Highways Performance Space and Human Resources LA). Amanda holds an MFA in Visual Art and Playwriting from Rutgers University. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016 and was a resident at Kesey Farm in 2019. Amanda is currently a 2023-2024 Douglass College Faculty Fellow.

Roscommon native Anthony is a performer, writer, and producer known for his boundary-pushing work in musical theatre, cabaret, and club. He has presented work at Roundhouse, Dublin Fringe, National Theatre, and Southbank Centre. His latest hit musical Oliver Cromwell is Really Very Sorry premiered at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2022 to critical acclaim. It was followed by a sell-out national tour of Ireland and was nominated for Best Production, Best Costume, and Best Sound at the 2022 Irish Times Theatre Awards. Funded through the Arts Council’s Arts Grants Funding, he is currently undertaking the development of three new works including Jesus Christ, Our Lord God! a queer musical reimagining of Lourdes.

Christodoulos Makris is “one of Ireland’s foremost avant-garde poets” (The Irish Times, June 2023). His practice is rooted in contemporary experimental, cross-disciplinary, hybrid, documentary and collaborative poetics, with his work across page, screen, and live physical spaces concerned with language use, modes of communication, multiple/shifting identities, and the conflation of public and private enabled by digital technologies. He has published five books of poetry, as well as several limited edition pamphlets, artists’ books, digital projects and other poetry objects, with presses in Ireland, the UK, and North America. His awards include a Project Commission from Irish Museum of Modern Art, Digital Poet in Residence at StAnza International Poetry Festival (Scotland), Writer in Residence at Maynooth University, a Literature Project Award from The Arts Council of Ireland, and a Creativity Bursary from UCD, among many. He is the poetry editor at gorse journal, and co-founder and director of Dublin’s multidisciplinary performance series Phonica. Other curatorial credits include Is this a poem?, a mixed media exhibition and event programme currently running at Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI), as well as partnerships with International Literature Festival Dublin, Illuminations Gallery at Maynooth University, and European Poetry Festival.

Richard Maxwell is an experimental theatre director, artist, playwright, and Hell's Kitchen resident for the last 25 years. He has been the artistic director of New York City Players since its inception in 1999. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, The Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. His work has been commissioned by ICA London, Barbican Centre, Festival D’Automne, Kunsten Festival, and Vienna Festival, and presented at the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. His latest book is a collected trilogy: Evening Plays (Theatre Communications Group, 2020). Other books include The Theater Years (published by Westreich Wagner and Greene Naftali (2017), Theater for Beginners (TCG, 2015), and Plays, 1996-2000 (TCG, 2004). In January 2023 he presented his latest work, Field of Mars, at NYU Skirball Center.

Tina Satter’s theatre company, Half Straddle, is an Obie-winning, New York City-based ensemble of performers and designers that make plays, performances, videos, and music. With Half Straddle, she has written and directed 11 full-length plays and a series of shorter performances and video works that have been presented across the USA and internationally. In 2014, Half Straddle’s show House of Dance was nominated for a ZKB Patronage Prize at Zürcher Theater Spektakel. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. In October 2019, the critically acclaimed Is This A Room, a show conceived of and directed by Satter and starring Becca Blackwell, Emily Davis, Pete Simpson, and TL Thompson, with costumes by Enver Chakartash, was the company’s Off-Broadway debut at the Vineyard Theatre. The show premiered at The Kitchen in January 2019 and had its Broadway premiere in the fall of 2021. Satter made her feature film debut with Reality, an adaption of Is This A Room.

Hayley Stahl is a writer from Michigan based in New York. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, Yaddo, and Clubbed Thumb. She holds a BA in film from the University of Michigan and an MFA in playwriting from Hunter College. She is currently training as a psychoanalyst.