Dawn M. Simmons (she/her/hers) is an award-winning Director, Playwright, Producer, Administrator, Consultant, Advocate and Co-founder of The Front Porch Arts Collective. In recent years, she served as the Executive Director of StageSource, and Director of Performing Arts at Boston Center for the Arts. She has worked regionally with The Alliance Theater, the Huntington, Play On Shakespeare, Boston Lyric Opera, The Front Porch Arts Collective, The Hangar Theatre, WAM Theater, Central Square Theater, Lyric Stage Company, Greater Boston Stage Company, SpeakEasy Stage, New Repertory Theatre, Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Bad Habit Productions, New Exhibition Room, Boston Public Works, Fresh Ink Theatre, The Theater Offensive, Our Place Theatre Project, and Fort Point Theatre Channel. She serves on the board of ArtsBoston.

Keith Mascoll is a founding member and a part of the artistic team for The Front Porch Arts Collective. Keith has a New York Critics Choice Award for his performance as Bradley in Paula Caplin’s play, The Test. Keith received the Best Actor Award in John Adekoje’s one man play Love Jones. Keith’s favorite credits include The Whipping Man, Intimate Apparel, The Colored Museum, Six Rounds Six Lessons, The Dutchman, and Hamlet.  Keith has been seen in numerous commercial and film projects. Look for Keith in the lead role in 2017  in the movie Confused by Love, and in the Polka King directed by Maya Forbes.  Keith is producing and starring in a one-man show in 2017, and a short film called Argyles.  Keith earned his B.A. in Theatre at The University of Massachusetts.  Keith’s love of his craft, and  experience as a Founding Staff Member of the Citizen Schools Program has lead him to be a Teaching Artist with the Huntington Theatre Company.  Keith is also helping students develop historically focused theatrical scripts with the Moffitt-Ladd House and Garden in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  (Exploring the Issue of Slavery in the Era of American Revolution Project) Keith’s Passion to create work for himself as a full time Actor, while also creating opportunities for others is what fueled his involvement in this exciting new Company. The idea of  creating  Work in two different Mediums for Actors, while giving lesser known talent the platform to be seen has not been done in Boston. Keith is Humbled to be working with Maurice and Dawn to make that idea a reality.

Marcus Gardley is a poet-playwright who was awarded the 2011 PEN/Laura Pels award for Mid-Career Playwright. His most recent play, Every Tongue Confess, premiered at Arena Stage starring Phylicia Rashad and directed by Kenny Leon. It was nominated for the Steinberg New Play Award, the Charles MacArthur Award and was a recipient of the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. His musical, On The Levee, premiered last summer at LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater and was nominated for 11 Audelco Awards including outstanding playwright. Last spring, his play, And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, was produced at The Cutting Ball Theater and received the SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award nomination for outstanding new play and was extended twice. He has had six plays produced including dance of the holy ghost at Yale Repertory Theatre (now under a Broadway option,) (L)imitations of Life, at the Empty Space in Seattle, and like sun fallin’ in the mouth at the National Black Theatre Festival. He is the recipient of a Helen Merrill Award, a Kesselring Honor, the Gerbode Emerging Playwright Award, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre Award, the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Scholarship, and the ASCAP Cole Porter Award. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale Drama School and is a member of New Dramatists, The Dramatists Guild, and The Lark Play Development Center. He is a professor of Playwriting at Brown University.

Joyce Van Dyke’s The Women Who Mapped the Stars, commissioned by Central Square Theater with early script development assistance from The Poets’ Theatre and Jessica Ernst, is the inaugural play in the Brit D’Arbeloff Women in Science Production Series.  Running simultaneously with this premiere is the off-Broadway premiere of Daybreak, about two women survivors of the Armenian genocide. Daybreak is produced by Pan Asian Repertory Theatre with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts (April 21-May13).  It was previously produced in 2015 at Tufts; an earlier version had a workshop production in 2012 by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre under the title, Deported / a dream play. Joyce’s other plays include The Oil Thief, commissioned by the Ensemble Studio Theatre / Sloan Project, produced by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and winner of the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script (2009).  A Girl’s War, produced by Golden Thread Productions (2009), New Repertory Theatre (2003), and Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (2001), won the Gassner Award and the Boston Globe’s “Top Ten” plays of 2001. Joyce has been awarded residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Huntington Theatre Playwriting Fellows program, and Central Square Theater’s PlayPen. She teaches playwriting and Shakespeare at Northeastern and Harvard.  JoyceVanDyke.com

April 2018