OPC 2025
Summer conference &
new works festival playwrights
Lisa D’Amour
Lisa D’Amour is a playwright and interdisciplinary collaborator from New Orleans, Louisiana. She grew up in a world of ritual, activism, group spectacle and care, all of which continue to thrive in her work. Lisa's plays have produced by theaters across the country, including MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway, Playwrights Horizons (NYC), Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago), Woolly Mammoth Theater (Washington D.C.), Catastrophic Theater (Houston) and ArtSpot Productions (New Orleans). Lisa’s company PearlDamour makes interdisciplinary, often site-specific works, most recently premiering Ocean Filibuster, a genre-crashing human-ocean showdown (American Repertory Theater + touring). Lisa’s play Detroit was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Susan Smith Blackburn prize, and she’s received two OBIE Awards. She has received the Alpert Award for the Arts, the Steinberg Playwright Award and the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. She is currently the Distinguished Professor of Playwriting at the University of Houston.
Marvin González De León
Marvin González De León writes plays that incorporate a myriad of genres—from sci fi to horror—anchored in the traditions of Latin American literature. His work has been produced and developed at Arizona State University, Texas State University, Teatro del Pueblo, Repertorio Español, Round House Theatre, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Page 73, The Playwrights Realm, the Playwrights’ Center, The O’Neill, Berkeley Rep, and The New Group. He has received various writing fellowships including the Page 73 Playwriting Fellowship; as well as the Jerome Fellowship, the McKnight Fellowship, Core Writer, and the Many Voices Fellowship with the Playwrights’ Center. He was a member of the 2020 I73 Writers Group at Page 73. His plays have been nominated for The Smith Prize, The Arnold Weissberger New Play Award, The Ollie Award, and the Venturous Fellowship. He received his MFA in Dramatic Writing in 2017 at Arizona State University.
JuCoby Johnson
JuCoby Johnson (he/him) is a New York-based playwright, actor, and screenwriter originally from Jacksonville, FL. JuCoby is a second-year playwright in the Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program. He has been seen onstage at The Guthrie Theater, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, The Jungle Theater, Theater Latté Da, Theater Mu, Ten Thousand Things Theatre Company, and more. His plays include How It's Gon Be (Echo Theater, 2023), ...but you could've held my hand (CATCO, 2022; O'Neill NPC Summer Season, 2022), 5 (Jungle Theater, 2023; O'Neill NPC Summer Season, 2022; Seven Devils Finalist), Heritage (International Black Theater Festival, 2024); The Red Man (2025 Pacific Playwrights Festival, 2025 O'Neill NPC Finalist, 2025 Seven Devils Finalist); and Revelations (Playing On Air, 2021). His television credits include The Runarounds (Amazon). He is the recipient of McKnight and Jerome Hill Artist Fellowships and a member of the Sony Pictures Television Diverse Writers Program.
Deepak Kumar
Deepak Kumar (he/him) is a playwright, lyricist, composer and professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UC San Diego. He writes about the questions that keep him up at night, whether they be about Asianness, technology, youth, board games, or soul-eating demons. His shows have been developed and produced all over, with some highlights including The Old Globe and The Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center. He is a MacDowell Colony fellow and is currently on commission from Audible and Arena Stage.
Regan Moro
Regan Moro is a playwright and actor from the North Country of upstate New York. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan, was an apprentice in the Professional Training Company at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and is an incoming fellow in the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program at The Juilliard School. Her play "burn for You" recently received an industry reading directed by Tony Award winner Danya Taymor, was a Finalist for the 2024 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and received developmental reading at the 2024 Great Plains Theatre Conference. Her play "Tremolo" is a 2025 Irons in the Fire project for Fault Line Theatre, was a Finalist for the 2025 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, and a semifinalist for the 2025 Terrence McNally New Works Incubator. Regan is a recipient of the 2024-2025 Vitality Playwrights Commission from the Appalachian Center for the Arts, and a residency from Millay Arts. She’s the middle of three sisters, and the funny gay aunt to four little boys.
writers-in-residence
Vivian J.O. Barnes
Vivian is a writer from Virginia. Her short plays have been produced at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Steppenwolf Theatre. She has developed plays at MCC, Geffen Playhouse, The Playwrights Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Montana Repertory Theatre, and Ojai Playwrights Conference. She’s staffed on television series at Amazon, Apple TV, and Peacock.
Shayan Lotfi
Shayan Lotfi (he/him) was the Tow Playwright-in-Residence at the Atlantic Theater, where his play What Became of Us premiered. He is the recipient of the Horton Foote Award from the Dramatists Guild, a Citation of Excellence from the Laurents / Hatcher Foundation, two MacDowell Fellowships and is currently under commission from the Atlantic Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, and South Coast Repertory. He is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an alum of The Working Farm Writers’ Group at SPACE on Ryder Farm and Page 73’s I-73 Writers Group.
Jennifer Maisel
The daughter of an adhesives manufacturer and a teacher, Jennifer Maisel (she/her) grew up in a picture-perfect Long Island suburb where she once found a dead man in her driveway. Her plays include EIGHT NIGHTS, OUT OF ORBIT, YELLOW WALLPAPER 2.0 2020, THERE OR HERE and @thespeedofJake; they have been produced off-Broadway, nationally and internationally, and honored and developed by the Asolo Theatre, Sundance Theatre Lab, Kennedy Center, and the Ovation, Woodward/Newman, and PEN West Literary Awards. PROVENANCE was named the winner of the 2025 Jewish Plays Project. Jennifer also writes for film and tv; her movie, Lost Boy, starred Virginia Madsen and Sosie Bacon and she adapted two Jane Green novels for television. The screenplay adaptation of her off-Broadway play, THE LAST SEDER, won Showtime’s Tony Cox Screenwriting Award, meriting her a month’s stay in a haunted farmhouse at the Nantucket Screenwriters Colony, and is now in pre-production with Rosalind Productions.