Spotlight Series: New Plays in Process

Annie Meek Montgomery Working as a teaching artist in a variety of community settings for more than 25 years, Annie has directed, devised, structured and scripted countless performance pieces and plays with students of all ages across the city. This led to a passion for devised theatre inspired from true stories and universal human themes. Awarded the Department of Cultural Affairs SPARK grant, she wrote Memory for Spellbound Theatre Company devised with the members of St. Charles Jubilee Senior Center. In collaboration with A Space Between theatre company she wrote The Red Dress, performed at University Settlement and Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center. Additionally, over the pandemic, Annie collaborated with Piper Theatre Company and wrote and acted in the short film, Zoom with Me, which was accepted into 14 international film festivals and a finalist in 5, including: Toronto Indie Filmmakers, Seoul and Tokyo International Film Festivals, and Chicago Indie Film Awards among many others. As an actress, she has appeared in Walking Toward America at Springfield Contemporary Theatre and the United Solo Festival. Also in Off The Page’s, All American Boys which was featured on WNYC’s The Green Space. She has appeared in Piper Theatre Company’s  production of Splitfoot at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and The Lincoln Dress at Siena College and the Old Stone House. Previous credits: That Ilk, Off-Broadway at the Hudson Guild Theatre and several regional theatre productions at George Street Playhouse, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Hangar Theatre, Wayside Theatre. She is the Director of Education for Lifetime Arts, a national service organization with the mission to make arts learning accessible and equitable for older adults across the county.  She is also on faculty at the New School. Memory’s Kiss is the first full length play Annie has written, and it is the first time it has been read aloud by actors and to the public. She is very grateful for the support of Piper Theatre Company and John McEneny. 

Carolina Đỗ (she/her) is an actor, playwright, producer, and community organizer. As a first generation Việt born in America, the child of refugees and descendant of freedom fighters, she believes strongly in the power of weaving new and de-colonizing narratives for new world building.  She is a founding Artistic Leader of The Sống Collective whose mission is to nurture a community of artists whose work explores questions of identity, race, intersectionality, immigration, and the refugee experience. As an actor, she has worked on Broadway in back-to-back shows at Second Stage, collaborated with PlayCo, JACK, Yangtze Rep, Piper Theater, LoadingDock, CreativeTime.  She’s had films screened at SXSW, Austin Film Festival, Outfest, AAIFF, among many others. TV: FBI: Most Wanted, Blue Bloods, Law & Order SVU. As a community organizer, she’s a founding member of Asians4Abolition and is the Community Engagement Associate at PlayCo. BFA Brooklyn College. She is very thankful to continue to deepen her relationship with John and Piper to build a space for playwrights to be in community with one another.

Diana Ly is a Vietnamese-American screenwriter and playwright based in New York. She grew up as an expat in the Philippines before studying Computer Science at Stanford and subsequently working at Google and the YouTube Space LA. She’s currently a Women in Film|Black List Feature Resident and an upcoming Ragdale Artist Resident. She was previously a member of The Sống Collective’s Inaugural Việt Writers Lab (Playwriting), a Project Involve Fellow at Film Independent and a participant in DreamAgo’s Plume & Pellicule Screenwriting Workshop. She’s also been a finalist for the Hillman Grad Mentorship Lab, the CBS Writers Mentoring Program and was the runner-up for Nantucket Film Festival’s Feature Screenplay Competition. She recently worked as a features assistant to showrunner Karin Gist. She’s currently pursuing her MFA in Playwriting at Hunter College. Diana writes stories about dysfunctional families, immigrants, nerds, and women who defy stereotypes. 

JANE ELIAS is an actor and writer based in Brooklyn. Most recent: world premiere of Mark Medoff’s Time and Chance (Rio Grande Theatre, Las Cruces, NM). Other theater includes Do This One Thing for Me (solo play by JE: Estrogenius Fest, Access Theater, Secret Theatre, TBG Theater, & NY Fringe), Hamlet and As You Like It (Theater at Woodshill, Utica, NY), and the NYC premiere of Arlene Hutton’s Letters to Sala (Barrow Group). Jane’s play Baby Steps was a finalist for the City Theatre National Award for Short Playwriting and the Heideman Award; Girl Is Mine was a nominee for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and a semifinalist for the Austin Film Festival playwriting competition. Her short film Placeholders, which she wrote and co-directed, had its NYC premiere in the 2019 New York Short Film Festival. In 2020 she created #SonnetCoronaProject, a collaborative project in which for 328 days during the pandemic she wrote a sonnet a day for a different actor to perform. BA, English, Duke;  MFA, poetry, NYU. Acting training: Michael Howard Studios; Larry Singer Studios; The Barrow Group. jane-elias.com.

GABRIEL HERNANDEZ (Amanda’s Dad) is an actor, emcee, voiceover artist, and educator who originally hails from Hoboken, NJ. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies and a master’s degree in Education, both from Yale University, he taught history and theater in middle schools and high schools in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut before transitioning full-time into the performing arts world. Recent theater credits include It’s a Wonderful Life (Mile Square Theatre), La Canción (Repertorio Español), El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom (Two River Theater), CasablancaBox (HERE Arts) and ¡Guaracha! (PRTT). His solo show Quarter Rican is currently in development at Pregones Theater in the Bronx and has been featured at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, the podcast Bagels and Plantains, and most recently at Newark Symphony Hall. He lives in Jersey City Heights with his wife Rachel and their two young sons