Act Out: A Queer Review

ANNALISA DIAS is a playwright, performer, and director. She is a Producing Playwright with The Welders, a DC playwright's collective; and is Co-Founder of the DC Coalition for Theatre & Social Justice. Plays include: 4380 Nights, The Last Allegiance, One Word More, A Legacy of Chains, Servant of the Wind, and To Defend Freedom. Recent collaborators include: Theater Alliance, the Phillips Collection, the Gulfshore Playhouse, Signature Theatre's SigWorks Program, the Mead Theatre Lab Program, the Atlas Intersections Festival, and Longacre Lea. Annalisa frequently teaches theatre of the oppressed workshops nationally and internationally and speaks about race, identity, and performance. She was named a Rising Leader of Color in 2016 by TCG, and works in diversity and inclusion full time at the American Political Science Association. Her piece 4380 Nights will be produced at Signature Theatre in 2018. More information at annalisadias.weebly.com. @ajdm

NATALIE ANN PIEGARI is a playwright, actor, producer, administrator, poet, mental health activist, and general doer-of-things. Natalie has worked in various capacities with Caps Lock Theatre, Forum Theatre, Theatre Alliance, Rorschach Theatre, Young Playwrights' Theater, NuSass, Pussy REP, Spitball Theatre, Pace Productions, Flying V, Interrobang, Mobtown Players, the Kennedy Center's Page2Stage Festival, and others. She is a company member of Pinky Swear Productions. You can also find her working with local burlesque troupe Manic Pixie Nightmares, performing slam poetry, or with her band Bourbon & Blonde.

AMANDA ZEITLER is a DC-based playwright, teacher, and Jane-of-all-theatre-trades. She received her M.F.A. in Playwriting from the Catholic University of America in May 2015. Amanda is the winner of several awards including second national Kennedy Center Theatre for Young Audiences Award for her play The Mage Knights of Eternal Light and the 2014 Wichita State University National Playwriting Award for her play La Llorona.  Many of Amanda's short works, including On the Rocks, Creatures of ILMS, Why You Shouldn't Have Sex in a Car, and The Butterfly Fan have received productions and readings through out the DC Metro area. Her short play Bite Me was also recently featured in Arcadia University's New Perspectives, a festival featuring new works by up-and-coming female playwrights. She has been the commissioned playwright for Imagination Stage's Speak Out Onstage program for the past two years. For more information on any of her plays, please visit her profile on the New Play Exchange.

Amanda is a co-founder/producer for Act Out, a monthly theatrical action series, as well as Scribblers Support, a local writer's workshop. She worked as an actor and stage manager for many DC companies included Borealis Theater, the COIL Project, and Unknown Penguin. She is also a burlesque performer and member of the Manic Pixie Nightmares, a feminist, aggressively inclusive, anti-racist, LGBTQA+ positive, neo/nedlesque-burlesque troupe.