Chantal Bilodeau is a New York-based playwright and translator originally from Montreal, Canada. Her play Sila recently won the Woodward International Playwriting Prize as well as First Prize in the Earth Matters on Stage Ecodrama Festival and the Uprising National Playwriting Competition. She is the recipient of a Jerome Travel & Study Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Productions include Hunger (Bated Breath Theatre Company, 2011), The Motherline (New York International Fringe Festival, 2009), Pleasure & Pain (Magic Theatre; Foro La Gruta, Teatro La Capilla and Festival de Teatro Nuevo León in Mexico City, 2007), and the English translations of Blue-S-cat and Bintou by Koffi Kwahulé (The Invisible Dog, 2012 and The Movement Theatre Company, 2010) and Abraham Lincoln Goes to the Theatre by Larry Tremblay (Alberta Theatre Projects, 2010).

Her work has been read and developed at the California Institute of Technology, 3rd Kulture Kids, Golden Thread, the Neanderthal Arts Festival (Vancouver), Carnegie Mellon University, Underground Railway Theatre, University of Connecticut, New York Theatre Workshop, Consortium for Peace Studies (Calgary), Mo`olelo Performing Arts Company, Lark Play Development Center, Play Company, Howard University, York University (Toronto), Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal, hotINK International Festival, Berkshire Theatre Festival, University of Miami, Teatro Lo Spazio (Rome), Williamstown Theatre Festival, Philadelphia Dramatists, and Met Theater.

Her translations include over a dozen plays by contemporary playwrights Julien Mabiala Bissila (Congo), Sébastien David (Quebec), Mohamed Kacimi (Algeria),  Koffi Kwahulé (Côte d’Ivoire), Étienne Lepage (Quebec) and Larry Tremblay (Quebec).

She is affiliated with the Dramatists Guild, NoPassport Theatre Alliance, the League of Professional Theatre Women, Playwrights Guild of Canada, Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal and The Fence.

Alan Ayckbourn This year marks Mr. Ayckbourn’s 52nd year as a theatre director and his 54th as a playwright. He has spent his life in theatre, rarely if ever tempted by television or film, which perhaps explains why he continues to be so prolific. To date he has written 77 plays and his work has been translated into over 35 languages, is performed on stage and television throughout the world and has won countless awards. Major successes include: Relatively Speaking, How the Other Half Loves, Absurd Person Singular, Bedroom Farce, A Chorus of Disapproval and The Norman Conquests. The National Theatre recently revived his 1980 play Season’s Greetings to great acclaim and the past year alone has seen West End productions of Absent Friends and A Chorus Of Disapproval. In 2009, he retired as artistic director of the Stephen Joseph, where almost all his plays have been and continue to be first staged. Holding the post for 37 years, he still feels that perhaps his greatest achievement was the establishment of this company’s first permanent home when the two auditoria complex fashioned from a former Odeon Cinema opened in 1996. In recent years, he has been inducted into American Theatre’s Hall of Fame, received the 2010 Critics’ Circle Award for Services to the Arts and become the first British playwright to receive both Olivier and Tony Special Lifetime Achievement Awards. He was knighted in 1997 for services to the theatre.