 Here is one of your hosts representing the League of Professional Theatre Women where she is Vice President of Programming and our Co-President, Shelyn Lubin. Thank you so much. I would like to introduce my new Co-President who is also our fabulous announcer representing every year she's our fabulous announcer representing SAG AFTER where she is National Co-Chair of the Women's Committee, Leslie Shreve. I know that's not what very recently was Co-President of the Coalition with Shelyn and still is my wonderful SAG AFTER local Women's Committee Chair, Avis Boone. I'm so glad that you guys are here tonight and you may not know this but most of you are members of Women in the Arts and Media Coalition. If you're a member of any of the unions, guilds and organizations who are members of the Coalition, you are a member. They pay the dues, you get the benefits. That includes, and please raise your hand if you're a member, Actors Equity Association, we got a picture now of them tonight, us tonight, Associated Musicians of Greater New York, Local 802 AFM, one of our newest members, The Dramatist's Guild, Professional Theatre Women, wait wait there's many more, New York Women in Communication New York Women in Film and Television, SAG AFT Directors and Choreographers, and Writers Guild of America East. And our affiliate organizations, Women in Music, Women Arts, oh we have a lot of people here tonight, Women Make Movies, Women's Media Center, Works by Women, Dancers Over 40, no one wants to say, Drama Desk, International Center for Women Playwrights, LA Film Playwrights Initiative, I'm sorry LA Female Playwright Initiatives, The Lambs, National Theatre Conference, Professional Women Singers Association, The Rehearsal Club, and 365 Women a Year. So you may notice we have many more member orgs than last time, yes? We are adding more all the time, it is very exciting. For over 20 years the Women in the Arts and Media Coalition has fostered its own brand of collaboration, combining our member organization's abilities and strengths, focusing on issues of concern to women in the arts. And we are committed to being the link between our member organizations as we collaborate to empower women in our industry through advocacy, mentoring, networking, and events. And we have two signature events, one is this one, the Collaboration Awards, in Women Working with Women, and the other is Vintage, celebrating the work and image of older women, which I know, which should be happening at this time next year, October 2016. We also collaborate with all of our member organizations to co-produce events like Swan Day, which is Support Women Artists Now Day, the last Sunday in March, usually held right here in this theater, partnering with SVA and NYWIFT. Our first SVA is our first academic affiliate, and we are so grateful to SVA for hosting us today. Thank you Reeves Lehman, who's off winning an award for a film he's in. Thank you also, Jess Jackson, Viya Alexander, and the whole staff here, you've been fabulous. Absolutely. They are fabulous. As to working in New Media, the Coalition networks and connects individuals and entire organizations to share information, to sponsor events, and to facilitate actions that nurture the voices and visions of women. The Coalition has grown so much in the last few years, especially online. Don't know if you've been to our website recently, but our website is one of the most important things we now offer you. On our website, you'll find our blog and communal calendar full of events and info from all of our organizations and more, including events that are live-streamed online and can be seen by anyone, anywhere, like this one, which is right now on HowlRoundTV. Thank you so much, HowlRoundTV, for live-streaming this tonight. And you'll also find our stage ops and screen ops newsletters full of submission opportunities at theater and film and video produced with the support of women arts and the League of Professional Theater Women. And our newest page links to gender parity studies across the country and around the world. Studies of women's representation in theater, film, and television, curated by the LA Female Playwrights Initiative. We have many thank yous in the program, so please read them. But we want to acknowledge especially the wonderful women who run our organization. So with the current Board of Organization Representatives of the Coalition, please stand up and be acknowledged. Acknowledging the foundation upon which we have grown. We'd like to recognize our past presidents like me. Can you please stand up? The celebration award process began almost a year ago with a dynamic team of women whose commitment and passion remains steadfast for an entire year. Our mission? To encourage and reward women who work collaboratively with women of other disciplines to create a new media art or media project. The reading committee carefully read and analyzed each submission over three rounds. And the last round was particularly difficult. There were so many quality submissions this year. Tonight, we not only celebrate the winning project and all the finalists, but also all the collaborations that will continue to be done by, for, and through the staunch support of the Women in the Media Arts Coalition. And now, we would like to introduce our keynote speakers. Two women who are models of collaboration themselves and fierce advocates for the voice and vision of women in the arts and media. Denise Albert and Melissa Mussen-Gerstein are co-creators of a multi-platform lifestyle brand featured on TV, online, in print, in taxi cabs, and on radio nationwide. They are hosts of the XM, the Serious XM Stars program, The Moms with Denise and Melissa. They also contribute to PIX 11 morning news every Monday. Albert and Gerstein have turned motherhood into a platform that reaches millions of parents each year. They created a town hall event series that they moderate called Mamarazzi, where they provide influential moms in media with access to celebrities to discuss issues. Recent Mamarazzi events have included celebrity guests Nicole Kidman, Salma Hayek, Jada Pinkett-Smith, and Tina Fey. They regularly partner with film distributors, book publishers, and celebrity publicists to present engaging and informative conversations. Denise Albert and Melissa Gerstein. The Moms! Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. We are truly honored. I'm Melissa. Great. I'm sorry. You might have guessed that. Sorry. Oh, again. This is really an honor. I'm originally from St. Louis, Missouri, and I moved to New York because I was a dancer and I had big dreams of Broadway. But I ended up working for Broadway producers Fran and Barry Weisler, who some of you may know. Some of you may be nodding and asking me if I'm okay. Yes, I'm okay. And it was a wonderful experience, but that led me into film and to television. And then I met this one, Denise, and you can take it away from there. And my background is I am from New York. You probably can guess that as well. My career was really in television and journalism. And I started working in television when I was 14 and then wound up as a senior producer at Good Morning America. And that's where I met Melissa in early 2000s, I guess. And Melissa was working at CNBC and CNN. We both were starting to have families and wanted to start a business that was really in line with everything that we'd worked so hard doing, which was television and journalism and telling people stories. And so we decided to start a company based on what we knew and loved, but in a space that we could sort of create and work around our schedules. And so we started a company that was originally called Moms in the City. And we started as a column in a newspaper, much like Sex in the City. We were writing a first person column based on anything that was going on in our lives. We tried to be bold and interesting. And we interviewed a celebrity based on what we were talking about. And from there we really thought, hey, we're writing this newspaper column, we should let people know what we're doing. So we just started a very casual email blast to let our friends and family and contacts know what we were doing. And from there we started booking ourselves on television shows and then we got into our own show. So we had a show for two years with NBC. They had a cable station called NBC Nonstop and we had a couple different segments on the show and one was called Mamarazzi, which was our celebrity interview about parenting. And we decided that the best place at the time in New York was to be in taxi cabs. And so we did our own little deal with the taxi folks. And so that's sort of how I think we really started to build our company. And then the channel was launching in Los Angeles and we said, hey, you know what, nobody's going to promote the show the way we can. So we flew to LA, we got a brand on board to pay for the party and we invited a few celebrities to come cover the event. And that was the first time that we said, hey, you know what, we can throw a party and get a little press out of it and make a little money. We might have something here. So, and she's speaking about our Mamarazzi events. And some of you have attended, you just recently attended our Suffragette Mamarazzi event with the writer Abby Morgan and Sarah, I'm saying her name. Do you remember her last name, Sarah? Anyways. And so what we do is we aggregate moms and women and bloggers to come and have a conversation around the topic of the film. Sometimes we do Broadway show Mamarazzi events and we bring the cast up after. And we talk about parenting and how it is today and being a working mom and a working woman. And what's really exciting is that everyone sort of lets down their guard and it's a really engaging conversation. And so our Mamarazzi events, we've done over 100 of them. We would love to have you attend. And we sometimes have celebrities such as Hugh Jackman, Sarah Jessica Parker, Hugh Jackman, Hugh Jackman. And we record the Mamarazzi event for our Serious Sexum show to engage other moms who can call in or dads or women, anyone, to engage in the conversation around parenting and around the celebrity and whatever they're promoting. And what's really nice is they let down their guard and they really talk about their children, which is the most important thing to them. And so it's fresh editorial content that you're not hearing anywhere else. Is that right? That's right. I think for us what we found in our town hall events, in our television appearances, in our Serious Sexum radio show is what we try to do is bring in other women from around the country and share their stories. Bring them on to talk with us about what topics they're writing about or they're talking about in their circles. It's really about bringing the conversation together and including as many different kinds of people as possible because we're really empowering. It is. It's very empowering and we feel like it's really just like any group of friends just chatting and we always said we're so different in a lot of ways. And so really just even in our parenting skills and we'll assist happily married or married children, I'm happily divorced with two. We do everything really differently. She thinks I'm loosey-goosey. She's not anymore for breakfast, but it's okay. But everything, you know, we always felt like we could really learn from each other and you might like something that I have to say. You might hate something I have to say. But the next thing that comes out of my mouth you might say, oh, I can relate to that. And so that's what we try to do in all of our conversations and that's what we try to do on our radio show is really engage other, not just moms, dads too, in the conversation. And when we go on PICS 11, we also bring other moms in the Tristan area on with us who might be trying to raise awareness to something that they're doing. So we really do like to share everyone's stories. Yes. You had that go. That was great. You did a really good job. So again, it's such an honor for us to be here. We hope to support all of you. We would love to invite you on our series XM show and talk about your organizations and support you however we can. But thank you so much. Oh, we're not done yet. No, because this is all about collaboration. So I think it's important to know about the collaboration that we have. That's nice. We call ourselves work wives. Hold on a minute. Like, I grew up watching LA Law. I'm sorry. I mean, I would race home from school and I remember my mom would tape it and I'd eat fruity pebbles which is probably the worst thing you could eat. And it's just so wonderful. But I get my two kids talking for breakfast and you're eating fruity pebbles. It was so great. You know how to bring back all the shows now? Let's bring it back. Can we? Let's start like a movement. No, you don't like it. You're tired? Yeah, you're not sure. Oh, he's not in the next class today. You'd rather do commercials, more residuals, right? I don't know. There you go. Where was I? Work wives. Yes, collaboration. So we hated each other when we met. Strong work. We didn't. Why? You two strong women. Not like her. Sorry. You didn't like me either. You're pretending no? Hard to say. Right. But we did not like each other. I don't know why we gave it another chance. But we did. I think we both were drawn to each other because we found... This is so fun. We found... We did find, you know, somebody that you know works really hard like that was what brought us back together. After the initial meeting, we were like, oh, she's a bitch, or she thinks she's always right. But that's what it was. And so it did. It took some time. And we realized that we met our match because we met somebody who wanted it just as badly, who was going to work just as hard. And it's been... We took it in baby steps. I mean, we started as a common newspaper in 2009. The company, as it currently exists, is really since 2012. So it's taken a long time. But there's this incredible respect. We are best friends. We are sisters. We are wives. We are husbands. We are... Our kids are family. So it's beautiful. It's amazing. So it took time, but it works. I think the underlining theme is when you meet other women who work just as hard, it's contagious. Right. And that's why we're all here tonight. Yes. Okay. We're going to wrap it up now. But before we do, because we do, we've built our brand on social media. We do need to take a selfie and a regular picture. So, well, this is how... This is what we do. So we'll take one like this and then we'll give it to somebody else to do for us. Really? And then who's in the front row? Michael. This is what we do. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. We're really honored. We're very honored. Thank you. Aren't they fun? Thank you so much, guys. And their events are that much fun, too. Though I will say we all pride through Suffragette. But the event was great fun. And you should definitely get on their mailing list. Really hard to remember. Moms at themoms.com. Okay. The two women who really made tonight happen. And it took a long time. It took a year to do it. The co-chairs of the Collaboration Awards Committee and another example of outstanding collaboration. I want to ask the two of you to come out here now. Please give them a big hand. Representing the Dramatist Guild, Holly Harms. Now get ready to hand out all the awards and certificates. And now our award presenters. Casey McClain has worked as technical director for Dixon Place and is a production coordinator and resident lighting designer for Concrete Temple Theater where she has worked off-Broadway and toured internationally. Get this to India, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Italy and Bulgaria. Casey currently works as operations manager for Samuel French. Amy Rose Marsh began working for Samuel French as a literary intern and was quickly promoted to associate editor. During her time as editor she was responsible for bringing more than 400 new acting additions into print. Including new works by Sarah Rule and Theresa Rebic. She is currently the literary director of Samuel French where she oversees licensing and acquisitions. Together they are co-artistic directors of the Samuel French off-off-Broadway short play festival currently celebrating its 40th anniversary though they haven't been doing it for 40 years. To present the 2015 Collaboration Award Casey McClain and Amy Rose Marsh. And the Samuel French off-off-Broadway short play festival Amy and I are so honored and humbled to be asked to be presenters tonight. This is truly an honor. We want to thank Women in the Arts and Media Coalition for inviting us. So the Samuel French festival, the off-off-Broadway short play festival is the longest, it's the oldest running most continuous short play festival I think in the world. So we haven't quite figured that out but I know where no one could really compete with us. And we've been for the past 40 years a wonderful playground for playwrights to test out and explore new works often with collaborators. So the festival, Casey can explain a little bit more about how it works. It's actually a really fascinating festival. It's a little like American Idol but we've been doing it for 40 years so we're definitely had the idea first. So we open up submissions sometime between December and March and we collect as many short play festival or short plays as possible they have to be 30 minutes or less. Last year we got 1500 submissions our biggest to date and we're always looking for more. So from those 1500 a slew of volunteers in the office in New York and London and in LA read through all of the material we all grade it, we rate it somehow we get it down to 30 we go from 1500 down to 30 it takes about five months and so once we have those 30 then we get to send out amazing emails that tell these playwrights that they've made it into the festival. So we invite everybody to New York if they're in New York or not in New York to participate in our festival it's actually the festival is a week long so we'll do all 30 plays in four days and it's usually the end of July early August so in those four days in the first round of the festival everybody goes once there's seven to eight plays each night we invite celebrity judges in our caliber playwrights, artistic directors to come in and they will judge then they'll choose their favorite one to three we then have those four nights we usually have 10 to 12 that make it on to the finals and we go on Saturday we'll do 10 to 12 all in a row and then from there the staff chooses six to publish and license in a collection. Very big deal we've had a lot of great playwrights launch their career at the OOB festival and a lot of great female playwrights specifically launch their career we've always been kind of an alternative festival we pride ourselves on being off off Broadway and I think because of that and because of the spirit of experimentation and because for reading pools of submissions we've been incredibly successful at achieving gender parity for at least the past 10 years both in terms of our submission pool and also in terms of our winners in fact I think this year Casey Kirk if I'm wrong I think we had more women than men yeah it was actually a first time for us so more female playwrights they beat the male playwrights which was kind of fun fun for us but there was no bias we judge It really is a collaboration we ask the playwright to bring a producer we do bare bones just above the stage reading we give them black cubes and basic lighting so it really is about the raw script Yeah but it's a unique format I mean this playwright and their director their production company I mean they really have to trust each other and work to build something that can kind of work in this crazy festival space we've created and you know I like to say I mean the plays are the winners they're going to be published and licensed around the world and it's beautiful I mean we've had productions of festival work in places like Dubai and then you know a little high school in Kentucky so it's a very sweet end result but really the winners of the festival these great collaborations these great relationships that come out of working together between the director and the playwright but also between us and the playwright and us and the director so it's a really beautiful thing and we're very happy to be here tonight celebrating that with you all And with that now on to our 2015 collaboration award-winning project Queens for a Year this play is about four generations of women developed and researched and dramaturged on both parts by the playwright and the director and also by Elizabeth Williamson the associate artistic director of Hartford Stage over the course of the development it was workshopped at Hartford Stage the playwright knew the audience needed to experience the depth of conflict and she needed some collaboration to help clear up the issues that were raised by this play and she sought out a director who understood the conflict and knew how to guide a multi-generational ensemble of women to dramatize military women's history visually verbally verbally and orally The play speaks to a number of important issues for women Does a woman have to sacrifice what is female and assume a male attitude to succeed in a male-dominated warrior culture Is there any good place for women trained in combat in violence in war within our society At what price do we put women into a subculture whose language denigrates anything female What is the precarious thrill or revolution we get from the idea of women trained to kill What about women's unsung role as the cleanup crew for men harmed in war to put women into a career where the greatest danger is from her fellow male co-workers rather than the enemy All of these questions and more are explored in the rich textured, fully realized work and for the Women in the Arts and Media Coalition Awards the 2015 Collaboration Award to Queens for a Year and to its playwright, T.D. Mitchell and director, Cheryl Caller There who was embossed in music at the Huntington Theatre is her daughter, Toby Zarebsky Cheryl Caller, as they said she's embossing right now working with another female playwright So, I'm going to read her speech T.D. Mitchell has given a voice to a community of women that needs to be heard and poses a plethora of questions about what it means to be a woman in the military and at what sacrifice As importantly, she has illuminated this magnificent multi-generational female family and their bond with such great humility, emotion honor, intelligence, power and integrity T.D. shows up every single day setting the bar for being the best you can be She's incredibly kind and caring but never mistake her kindness for weakness She is a strong, brilliant woman who can listen with as much strength as she can speak This has and continues to be one of the most enriching collaborations of my mom's career She is beyond disappointed that she can't be here She feels like it is beyond appropriate to me to have her here to have me here in her place Sorry She strives to set an example for me and my sister Tess and to be an amazing woman in an amazing room with amazing women She feels it's her obligation to celebrate and support and give opportunity to all the females within her community She's honored and humbled to be celebrated by all of you and thanks to you and T.D. from the bottom of her heart Thanks It is a privilege to be in the company of such talented, creatively innovative women as are represented by the work of each finalist here tonight Some of your work I know and all of your projects I wish to know better and I sincerely applaud all of you Let's please do our next dozen projects together And as Cheryl asked Toby to accept for her tonight I have my very first supporter and collaborator who is my guest my mom Dolores because this whole multi-generational stories of women Cheryl and I have got going it's not limited to Queens for a year so collaboration unlike in television playwriting is not writing by committee a challenging endeavor in its own right but utterly unlike what I do as a playwright there are typically months and usually years of research where bits of story begin to irritate the inside of my skull behind my forehead right here leading to a physiological discomfort I've learned as my signal that it's time to write and those bits of scenes those flashes of moments between characters never reveal themselves in a linear form for me when I finally start putting words on paper I have no idea how the play begins nor how it ends no matter how I might pummel and wrestle my imagination my damned muse refuses to be linear I envy writers who can throw text on the blank page through sessions of devised theater co-working or at least in conversation with a partner director a la Landford Wilson and Marshall Mason a partner performer or collaborative company of performative artists such as Pina Bausch's Danz Theater Wuppertal or Steppenwolf the sort of incestuous dysfunctional family creative disorganization organization with the luxury of organic time is a home to be devoutly wished for even for someone like me who functions best with a minimum of five hours of solitude each day and I mean waking hours and when the brilliant dramaturge and associate artistic director at Hartford stage Elizabeth Williamson asked me if there was a director I especially wanted to work with for last spring's development workshop I immediately said Cheryl Caller now I didn't yet know if Cheryl and I would prove effective collaborators at least 90% of the work I do as a writer is bled out in solitude and another 2% done in the company of female writer friends some of whom are here tonight over too much wine as I lament about how I've bitten off more than I could chew and I'm just a big fraud and I can't really write and this happens with every play and they talk me down and pick me up and well that's collaborative in its way with the radical restructuring Elizabeth and Darko were encouraging me to go ahead and try with Queens at Hartford I was eager to see how well Cheryl and I worked together in the high stakes high pressure all too brief but densely valuable workshop environment a few years ago Cheryl was slipped what was the first draft of this play and asked that we meet I liked her immediately bold, passionate, warm, strong, feminist a little intimidating and unapologetic about being all of those she is known for directing premieres of new work and understands the profound vulnerability of both play and playwright as the script takes its first shaky steps into the world our tiny folds legs wobbly and trembling in rehearsal far from ready to run in the big race but the primary reason I wanted Cheryl is my collaborator with Elizabeth Williamson we were much more of a triumvirate of women than a duo is that Cheryl isn't the 26 year old fresh out of Yale school of drama in the Lincoln Center lab flavor of the month she's a grown woman she's a mother of two adult daughters for whom she paused her career at great cost to raise and so yes she's of a certain age for women in Hollywood or Broadway or too many industries means she's over 40 or over 45 even or dead thankfully Cheryl is very much alive and well even if she is cheating on me with another playwright in Boston right now but it's a woman so that's a better to me no one else could be more qualified to understand and help translate into performance a story about four generations of women of women with a history of doing men's work and to provide the checks and balances for a younger writer writing older characters like me than Cheryl not that I'm fresh out of grad school either as it turned out we three Cheryl Elizabeth and I collaborated beautifully together and the key to that success for us I believe to ask vigorous questions constantly of script structure of moments in story of language and of silences and specifically by Cheryl questions of our brave cast of eight women and for a change one token man and it was through that vigorous questioning that I was able to hear where I might shore up the weak points, tighten or extend the emotional arc create specificity where there had been too much ambiguity and to keep certain ambiguities opaque by active choice rather than by writer's oversight Cheryl protects without coddling and for me to be in the rehearsal room observing her challenging assumptions actors had made about a character or moment or intention in the script was itself a collaborative process between us even when I was just serving her. Now don't get me wrong we did not always agree but we consistently pushed each other to take risks and do better questions I am never out to give an audience the answers in my plays I endeavor instead to confront them with what I hope are difficult questions Cheryl and Elizabeth understood that goal and fully embraced it as their own we questions we questioned we spoke at the source spots and we question again and I cried in frustration and sleep deprivation and sometimes my answer was I don't know I pass ask me in two hours can I not just drink this non-fat chai latte in peace collaboration is not and cannot be a passive exercise nor can the mentorship and professional support of women by other women we as female artists cannot afford to waste time being anything less than adamant and vigorous and if necessary downright militant about working together challenging each other in a healthy way and pushing each other up and forward this responsibility is not limited to artists to recent studies show female scientists to be less likely to cite the publications authored by other female scientists than male scientists do of their male peers in another study female academics who are full professors and many times less likely to co-author papers with junior female academics than they are with junior male faculty and as we in the theater have seen proved too often female artistic directors of major theaters are just as likely to neglect to program more than one token play by a woman in their season and to hire no more than one single female director in their season women are perpetuating our own inequity falling down on our responsibility failing to raise each other's voices failing to help achieve that parody we say we deserve I had the incredible honor of meeting and spending an afternoon with a fierce 98-year-old veteran Don Seymour back in July Don was a wasp during World War II a woman air service pilot the wasp and wasps transported and tested military aircraft for the army and their oversized jumpsuits and underfunded program they trained baby face male cadets how to instrument flies, stull dive, land, bomb with, strafe from and troubleshoot each and every aircraft used by the US during the war Don became known for our expertise piloting B-17s the four engine flying fortresses we got to talking and she asked about my writing she was excited by my work that I was writing about women's unsung role historically in the US military and she wanted to know how she could see it or read it and follow my progress and I told her sure I had a website and I write under TD Mitchell to which she responded I don't understand why the initials why don't you write as Trista so I explained to her that it was to my professional advantage when people who didn't know me read my scripts that they presume I am a man because my work is described as muscular because my first break out play was for seven men over 60 and a 20 something Vietnamese dude again Jill I could very apologize but mostly because depending on which study you read men are 80 to 85 percent more likely to be given productions in the English speaking commercial theater than our females Don grabbed my hands and hers a flash of anger in her eyes shook her head and in that moment she saw me as her sister her comrade in the same damn war well isn't that just how it is for us shame the information and entrepreneurial pioneer Dame Stephanie Shirley made her fortune in the programming and system software world by founding a first tech company staffed solely by women in the early 1960s and in the process pioneered the idea of flex time and working out of the home for the code writers who were also moms much of the business conducted with her clients and investors during that era was via snail mail which was advantageous for Stephanie Shirley because at the suggestion of her husband when her business funding proposal letters were getting no response she adopted the nickname Steve and began signing her correspondence Steve Shirley and suddenly there were interested funders and they were writing back and though it was not a malicious dissemblance there was denying that in securing new business their assumption that Steve the CEO was a man coupled with their complete ignorance of the fact that Steve's entire workforce of data analysts, mathematicians tech engineers and programmers were women was what made it possible in the 1960s to build and grow her company freelance programmers a company valued at over $3 billion ultimately making 70 of her employees millionaires because she also helped pioneer the employee as percentage owner compensation structure so finally the male business culture could dismiss this powerhouse no more Dame Steve is fond of saying you can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads they're flat on top from being patted patronizingly oh well done you well done I look around this room and I see quite a few flattened heads and I wish that women collaborating with other women was de rigueur rather than something extraordinary requiring an award such as this one I think about meeting Don Seymour and though I am deeply flattered by being thought of a sister to a woman I regard as a heroine I am embarrassed that at 98 I have not done better by her through greater advancement in the status of women in our varied professions for women to continue to regard each other as competitors and adversaries is counterproductive and ultimately self defeating there is no time to waste no time for pacivity or polite acquiescence the time for this work together this vigorous collaboration not just now it was 70 years ago so please let's get on with the work please Leslie Shreve just come join us that was fabulous thank you now you see what a great writer she is and you must all go read and you see I wish you could have been there the night we debated these awards I mean first of all it was so much fun but also these next things that you're going to hear about had such an equivalent amount of support and admiration from the reading team that instead of doing what we usually do which is tiering them we decided to just have three equal on it finalist teams the quality of the work that is submitted to us is one of the great joys of having the collaboration award the other is hearing from these women how they work together so we want to give each pair of collaborators just a few minutes to tell you a little bit about their collaborative process the first one is yellow card, red card which is based on the real life stories of the girls in breaking ground football a girls soccer program in Nagom Dere Cameroon which is predominantly Muslim it was a shot in the dark getting families to let girls out of the home to join the team and not knowing what the long-term effects might be of the program the pieces structure mirrors that of a soccer match on the field the girls perform the physical work of drills and exercises while they test the limits of their abilities and their expectations at home the girls perform the housework of preparing meals while under the unilateral authority of their husbands and fathers the scenes that occur on the field are comprised of athletic movement that occurs simultaneously with the dialogue by the end of the play the scenes move fluidly between on and off the field and for a few minutes it seems the girls on and off field selves have coalesced as much as they possibly can for honored finalist yellow card, red card director Tamela Woodard who is in Cuba tonight with TCG so can't be here and playwright Melissa Tian thank you so much thank you it's such an honor to be among the theater makers who are being acknowledged tonight there are many others of course doing fierce and beautiful work, maybe some of you or people you know and I wanted to take a moment and say how important it is to have your support so that women in theater can continue against powerful odds to do the work that they do not only is it important to encourage women to keep making theater it's necessary to encourage them to make it together there's no better or quicker way to achieve parity by 2020 when I started work on yellow card, red card I knew that the only way to tell the truth of what these girls are living was to go to Cameroon bring back what I had seen and work with women to bring to life this story of women achieving their own agency when I began thinking about bringing on board a director and a wish list I asked a trusted colleague for her recommendations and was happy to see that Tamela Woodard was at the top of both of our lists I had not yet met Tamela but I had seen her work and I'd heard good things and while I thought of how I'd approach her with the project I'd gone to a reading and lo and behold she was in the audience before the reading began in a now or never moment I tapped her on the shoulder I had a play I thought she might be interested in we talked more during intermission made plans to meet and after that meeting have been joined at the hip for this project ever since and I can't pinpoint exactly what makes her a great collaborator for this particular play though in general a good collaborator will share your vision, be communicative and be a good listener Tamela does all these things but there is something more she loves the play that's clear but she also brings to it a serendipitous blend of experience intelligence, creativity and thoughtfulness that makes the play a bloom a little more each time we work on it and she brings all of herself to it there is nothing more I could ask from a creative partner right now as we've learned Tamela is in Cuba and she is a cohort of artists who receive special permission to be there observe and take notes besides being incredibly jealous I am incredibly proud to call her my collaborator thank you South Street Annie is inspired by the life of Gloria Wasserman the profane mother of the Fulton Fish Market and later East 4th Street she spent decades selling newspapers, cigarettes and herself to the fishmongers on South Street until the fish market moved to the Bronx then she took up residence on the steps of KGB Bar and became a storytelling dirty joke telling fixture until her death in 2010 at the same time she lived as Annie on the streets however she raised a family and was putting her granddaughter through college set in and around the Fulton Fish Market final days downtown South Street Annie is a time spinning tale of fish, loss sex, architecture and the ghosts of New York City with music for honor finalist South Street Annie playwright Carson Kreitzer who can't be with us tonight so she'll be represented by Carol Lynn Baumler and director Elise S. Singer thank you all so much congratulations to the other finalists first I want to say that in honoring this playwright director collaboration the coalition is also honoring a third collaborator actor Carolyn Baumler for more than two decades I have worked with Carolyn on original plays many of which were created specifically for her and South Street Annie was initially conceived with her in mind Carson and I have known each other since the 80s and had never worked together and Carolyn had worked with Carson a number of times and Carolyn and I have worked together founded a company and this project is born of that three way collaboration and we also had envisioned the extraordinary Lynn Cohen who is with us here today for the project from the outset and have been just honored to be working with her as another collaborator as a central collaborator on the piece for the past year the thing I wanted to say was that South Street Annie is still very much a work in progress and I feel that my collaboration with Carson is still a work in progress during the New Georgia's Audrey residency that we were fortunate to receive last year our focus was really on the text and the sonic landscape of the piece but there's still so much to explore of the world of the play as we continue to collaborate finding the shape and the scope of the piece it's vocabulary, it's dramaturgy how to tell Annie's extraordinary story most effectively and most dramatically so thank you so much thank you so I'm reading this on behalf of Carson who couldn't be here tonight and she says this collaboration began with the New York Times obituary of a fascinating woman which I posted to my Facebook wall Elise commented maybe this should be our project something we've been talking about for years so really this collaboration began with the desire to collaborate the process has been a joy working with Elise writing for Carolyn Baumler and getting to do it all in an Audrey residency at New Georgia's with a final reading at New York Theatre Workshop thrilling and rewarding beyond belief the piece has been a treasure hunt and a mystery pouring over pictures of the South Street Seaport at various times in its history finding treasured bits and glimpses of our heroine putting together a story of immigrant families of fierceness of New York and turning over and over the question raised by Gloria Wasserman's life among ourselves with actors and with audience her pull is tremendous elemental thanks to all who have given us these opportunities to explore and thanks to the women in the arts and media coalition for recognizing and supporting these collaborations Every Fold Matters is a collaborative site-specific performance with film and dance about the work of doing laundry with text developed from interviews with New York City neighborhood laundromat workers it is performed amidst the washers and dryers of a working laundromat looking at the labor of laundry through a personal and social lens providing new insight into the way and the care of the things closest to our bodies Stories about intimacy, clothes dirt, stains money and time are revealed through heightened dialogue and gestural choreographed sequences This piece also provides an opening into an historic form of domestic work which is often unseen, tended to tended to be done by those who go unrecognized and undervalued For honored finalists Every Fold Matters playwright, director Lizzie Olesker and filmmaker writer Lynn Sax Thank you so so much for this honor for this fabulous collaboration that I've had with filmmaker Lynn Sax I think what we really wanted to talk about today was the nature of starting something new at a point in your life I've sort of been on this trajectory for 20 or 30 years but I've been a filmmaker for quite a long time I call myself an experimental documentary filmmaker and I felt like I knew my process pretty well and then there comes a point where you say well, I don't necessarily want to go learn a new language I'm not really into knitting it's not that I just want to travel all over the world because living in New York and with observing things the observation could then be translated into an artwork so I'll let Lizzie tell you a little more about how that all got started This project began I was commissioned to do a piece of performance piece in a working laundromat through an organization called Loads of Pros and dirty laundry readings done by Emily Rubin who in fact was sort of another collaborator with us as a producer and I did a piece with three performers where we gathered stories about doing laundry and then I saw something that Lynn was doing a film project called Your Day is My Night where she was looking at bed apartments in Chinatown and I just thought her vision was so unique and singular in that it had this incredible interiority as well as a social understanding and framing and I thought how amazing that would be to have film as part of the performance in the laundromat that maybe we could project onto clothes and sheets and that it would really add this whole other thing to what I was doing but I'll just say that for me I've collaborated with a lot of different theater people but I had never collaborated with another form so when I heard about this award it seemed so perfect to me because we really are collaborating not only as two women and two artists but these two forms came together and with that in mind I'll also say oh so when working on the piece she really brought this other sensibility to it and I've had other wonderful collaborations but what her sensibility was as a filmmaker as an experimental hybrid filmmaker I was not only engaged in the work but I was incredibly inspired by her way of working and her vision and I'll just say that we're continuing we're not just performing we've done it in many laundromats and I'll just say several of the laundromats we did and have since closed it's a disappearing thing in New York City these neighborhood laundromats as neighborhoods change laundromats are disappearing but we're continuing by just making a film so we did a theater piece and now we're going to do a film of the text I wanted to say one thing about the collaboration so often we know that in the art making journey that the biggest obstacles that stand in your way the things that you think are going to stop you the wall that you can't climb actually on that wall is often some form of graffiti or a mural that tells you how to make that piece but you just have to figure out where the ladder is so Lizzie came to me because she wanted to do a project around laundry workers and she thought well, Lynn has a lot of experience talking to people in New York City kicking that in or not pushing in but tapping on that proverbial door that separates you from me and me from you I've been doing that for a while and I've just done a lot of work in Chinatown and so she said let's go talk to the laundry workers together and I said no problem I issue my own license we can do that so we spent a year making appointments with laundry workers and we would get there for our date for our interview and I would have my tape recorder and every single time they'd say turn off the tape recorder my boss won't let me talk to you my husband won't let me talk to you I don't have my documentation I don't want to be on camera I don't even want to tell you my name outside we won't even ask you what your name is we just want to talk to you and then what happens a filmmaker that would say uh oh I can't make this film but a playwright can say we'll just write it we heard all of this we'll create composites I'll just we'll end we have to stop so thank you again and I just want to say that the play will come out of that silence in what people were unable to say but that eventually we did speak to them and that it came from that but again thank you so much thank you we also want to make note of our four finalist teams also all worthy projects as they come up to receive their certificates we will tell you a little bit about each piece for Arctic Soul Mirra Gandhi and Aram Claybourne are you guys here? African American artist Myra Gandhi and Korean American playwright actor Aram Claybourne created a multimedia art exhibition and theatrical performance Aram portrays eight different characters in an autobiographical story that chronicles her journey from South Africa to the streets of New York this is merged with the multimedia art show with both theater and visual art components presented at an equal level Aram portrays coupled with the collages videos and paintings of Myra Gandhi's both of her own memories and inspired by the play makes for an intimate experience with the audience and the audience the play makes for an interesting and unusual landscape the pieces bring brings together the 1980s hip hop era immigrant stories pop culture visuals and New York for still will be heard songwriter performer Liz Queller and director Mindy Cooper marrying contemporary American folk and roots music to the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Malay presents a new take on both the traditional song cycle and the poetry itself a multimedia piece still will be heard explores the power of words lost and found and the power of art to heal and communicate unique in its structure with bottle logs, songs, letters and poetry woven together with video images and staged tableaus bringing deeper meaning to the poetry that serves as a common thread our last two finalist teams could not be here with us tonight but we'd like to tell you a little bit about these projects I mean don't they all sound so fascinating and I also love hearing the stories of how these people work together and how they've found their way through the collaboration I just think it's also inspiring St. Joan is a collaboration between playwright Julia Pascal who lives in London which is why she can't be with us and director Katrin Hilba who is opening a show right now in Konstanz, Germany St. Joan is about a black Jewish Londoner who dreams she's Joan of Arc and tries to subvert the historical drive toward slavery and show it takes the concept of the woman warrior and satirizes male power and hegemony music, dance and experimental theater techniques inform the text using imagery to express the subtext this piece reclaims Joan of Arc from the xenophobic right in France to whom she is a heroine and reinvents her as a black Jewish woman who is trying to challenge history and the horror collaboration between filmmaker Lillian Marrow and actor Gabriel Schaefer it is a short film about two women on very different frequencies brought together to find the loneliest whale who sings too high for other whales to hear this mock behind the scenes of a British nature show is a story about unexpected encounters that turn into moments of connection this film was shot over three days on a small boat with an entirely female cast and crew on board inspired by a true story of the loneliest whale this film reveals the underlying connection between people living things and the environment where there is a disregard for other living beings there is a disconnect that must be bridged this film inspires empathy for the loneliest among us whales and please forgive us if we've mispronounced any names we've gotten to know these people and these pieces so well that of course we did it all through reading so we did not know the proper pronunciation of certain things these were such unusual works and collaborations this year and very exciting for us and hopefully exciting and inspiring for you as well now we are going to say thank you to you for joining us for the award to everyone who worked so hard and contributed to making this happen we are going to note a few of them more in a minute and to SVA who has been fabulous to us and we do hope that you will join us in the lobby at our afterglow party for food and wine and meeting our winners and special guests but first we would like to take a minute to let you know how important the women in the arts and media coalition we believe that expanding those whose voices are heard and what images are seen can change the world and we take great pride in the work we do to support that our collaboration awards vintage, swan day gender parody and theater initiative and our new mentorship program in the process of being launched all support women in a way that isn't being done anywhere else and we accomplish much more together than we could alone but we do need funding for our events and for the stage ops and screen ops newsletters and to offer more services to our membership please consider a tax deductible donation tonight or go to our website anytime and donate by raffle tickets you can always buy raffle tickets there is still time to buy them so while you are eating and drinking and buying and joining yourselves and thank you so much those fabulous folks who donated the prizes and holly harms who pulled it all together thank you all our guests including some special guests we would like to introduce Elsa rail down here who was instrumental in founding this organization and for whom our big take award is Elsa rail like producers Pat Addis who happens to have raffle tickets around her neck both of whom are special advisors to the coalition where's Sherry after diversity department here's Steve Michael Tucker thank you for being here Jill Eikenberry work and organic change women can generate together and we hope you have a good time here tonight we did so we hope each one of you guys did and if you want to learn more about our member orgs and the coalition itself hopefully you want to share if we had the help of each and every one of you here in the lobby there's lots of information available on our info table email us or sign up on our website if you're not yet on our mailing list to find out about all of our events and projects and let us know if you'd like to become more involved with the coalition as a volunteer in person or online or maybe even as an organization rep on our board think about it those of you who are not yet on our board and being on the mailing list will also ensure that you know when we are accepting submissions for our next collaboration award we hope to see your project in there now heads up we are going to be calling up each of our member organizations to get our group photos in front of the step and repeat out there so listen for your union or association's name thank you all so much thank you