WORKER CROWS

MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY (UPSTART CROW FOUNDER & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR) is the author of The Year of Yes: A Memoir (Hyperion, 2006), which has been translated into a variety of languages, optioned for the screen by Paramount Pictures and the Jinks/Cohen Company, and for television by 20th Century Fox and producer Barry Josephson. Her plays have been workshopped and produced at venues including The Sundance Playwrights Lab , Esperance Theatre Company, Soho Rep, The WordBRIDGE Playwrights Lab, The Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices Lab, Idaho Theatre for Youth, Brave New Works, and Boise Contemporary Theater. Her prose has been published or is forthcoming in a variety of magazines, newspapers, literary journals, and anthologies including The New York Times, Elle, The Washington Post, The Saint Ann’s Review, Best American Erotica, The Daily Telegraph, and Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex (Bloomsbury, 2008). She’s been seen on television programs including The Today Show, MSNBC’s Countdown, and more. She is currently working with director Mark Rucker on a contemporary adaptation of Romeo & Juliet. She's also at work on a novel. Headley is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a founding member of The Memoirists Collective. She was trained in NYU's Tisch School Dramatic Writing Program, where she met Ruth McKee. She lives in Seattle and NYC.

RUTH MCKEE (UPSTART CROW DEPUTY) - Ruth, upon hearing about Upstart Crow, volunteered to help with anything that needed helping with. At the moment, it's an extremely nebulous and wide-ranging position. Eventually, she will be point person in the student/contest portion of Upstart Crow, as well as one of the Upstart Crow playwrights. Ruth McKee's The Nightshade Family was produced in the 2007 SPF Play Festival. It was a runner-up in the 2006 Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Contest and received readings at the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta, and Playwrights Horizons. It was a finalist for the 2007 Stanley Drama Award, and originally produced in the 2006 Baldwin New Play Festival at the University of California, San Diego. Other plays have been presented in New York by Six Figures Theatre Company, HB Playwrights Foundation, and Access Theatre. Originally from Canada, by way of Bangladesh and Kenya, Ruth has a BFA from NYU, an MFA from UCSD, and currently lives in Los Angeles.

CATE YU (UPSTART CROW LITERARY INTERN) - Cate will be, as of June 2008, a graduate of Stanford University, with a concentration in English Literature, and has completed through NYU in London an intensive course on Shakespeare and Modern British Theatre, studying 26 Shakespeare plays. While at Stanford, she studied under playwright and Upstart Crow member Amy Freed. Cate wrote her first one-act second semester of high school on a break from fiction writing. The word Beat was used a lot to make the page look more "dramatic." It was produced her freshman year of college and was a finalist in the National Young Playwrights Competition. She has since interned at the Public Theater for the rock musical Passing Strange, as the creator Stew's personal assistant. Cate is excited by anything related to Shakespeare. She would like to suggest that the much contested meaning of the "second best bed" was a loving gesture to Anne: full of fond private memories between the Shakespeares. She is currently working on a reimagining of Antigone which she hopes to submit to grad school next year.