Panelist Bios

DOUG BEDARD/aka PLEX is an emcee, lyricist and producer and a founding member of Edmonton’s renowned hip-hop group Won 18. He is Ojibwa from the Peguis First Nation. Plex spent several years writing, performing and building the foundation for what would become New Leaf Entertainment, an entertainment company and record label focused on developing new talent and producing, promoting and managing already established local artists. Since inception, the group has performed to sold-out crowds in over 250 venues. They have toured first nations communities across Western Canada and have opened for some of the most notorious groups around, including Run DMC, Xzibit, Pharcyde, Ice T, Saukrates, Black Sheep, Redbone, The Guess Who, Choclair, Kardinal Offishal, K-Os, The Hieroglyphics, Total and Maestro. More recently Plex has joined Aboriginal Voices Radio as the host and producer of The Plex Show, Canada’s first Global Indigenous urban/hip-hop show. He also joined an exclusive group of songwriters to compose an original anthem for the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation called “Sit By My Fire.” As CEO and President of New Leaf Entertainment, Plex is working with some of Canada’s hottest up-and-coming musical talent while producing his debut solo album, due out in the summer of 2008.

OSKAR EUSTIS is the Artistic Director of The Public Theater and has worked as a director, dramaturg, and artistic director for theaters around the country. From 1981 through 1986 he was resident director and dramaturg at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco, and Artistic Director until 1989, when he moved to the L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum as Associate Artistic Director until 1994. Mr. Eustis then served as Artistic Director at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island for eleven years. In 2005 he took the helm at New York’s Public Theater. Throughout his career, Mr. Eustis has been dedicated to the development of new plays as both a director and a producer. At The Public, he directed the New York premiere of Rinne Groff’s The Ruby Sunrise. At Trinity Rep, he directed the world premiere of Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production); Homebody/Kabul (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production); the world premiere of Rinne Groff’s The Ruby Sunrise; Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches (Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director); Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika; as well as world premieres of plays by Philip Kan Gotanda, David Henry Hwang, Emily Mann, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ellen McLaughlin, and Eduardo Machado. He commissioned Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco and directed its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum. He was a professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance at Brown University, where he founded and chaired the Trinity Rep/Brown University Consortium for professional theater training. He received an honorary doctorate from Brown in 2001 and currently serves as Professor of Dramatic Writing and Arts and Public Policy at New York University.

GARY FARMER, part of the Cayuga First Nations Confederacy, has been an actor happily for 32 years. Gary can be seen weekly on TV series, Easy Money, Sunday nights at 9 pm on CW TV Network in the US and CITY TV Network in Canada. Gary teaches acting and directing at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he also currently resides. Gary also fronts his own blues band "Gary Farmer and the Troublemakers".

ERIC GANSWORTH, from the Onondaga Nation, is a professor of English and Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. His books include Mending Skins (PEN Oakland Award), and A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function, (National Book Critics Circle’s “Good Reads” List). His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Boston Review, Shenandoah, Cold Mountain Review, Poetry International, New York Quarterly, Yellow Medicine Review, American Indian Quarterly, Stone Canoe, UCLA American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Many Mountains Moving, and Studies in American Indian Literature, among other journals.

DIANE GLANCY (Cherokee) is a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she teaches Native American Literature and Creative Writing. Glancy’s novels include Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea and The Man Who. Her play Salvage, which received a reading in last year’s Native Theater Festival at The Public, was performed at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, October 31-November 23, 2008.

TERRY GOMEZ, from the Comanche Nation-Numunu Nation, is a published and produced playwright and writer, theatre director, actor, painter and educator. Her play Inter-tribal was produced as a staged reading at The Public Theater in New York City and published in the anthology Plays by Women of Color. Other plays produced in various New Mexico venues include Numunu Waiipunu: The Comanche Women, Inter-tribal, Reunion, The Antigone, A Day at the Night Hawk, Carbon Black, Rain Dance, Melanin, and The Woman with a Mustache. Tobacco Leaves, a collaboration with Red Eagle Soaring Theater Troupe, premiered and toured Seattle, Washington and the surrounding area. Gomez has been an adjunct faculty member teaching theater arts and dramatic writing classes at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and faculty for the I.A.I.A./ABC/Disney Summer Film Program. She has been artist in residence for the youth troupe Red Eagle Soaring and has given workshops at the International Workshop Festival in London, England. She is a recipient of the 2007-2008 American Indian College Fund/Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship. She recently directed a series of staged readings for the 2008 Two Worlds Native Theater Festival in Albuquerque.

CHRISTOPHER HIBMA joined the Sundance Institute Theatre Program in 2005, and currently serves as its Associate Director working alongside Philip Himberg as his administrative/artistic partner. Since arriving, Christopher has produced Labs in Florida, Wyoming and Utah and helped to create programs in Chicago, New York and East Africa. He negotiated Sundance’s first Actors’ Equity contract and administered its new commissioning program. Before joining Sundance, he served as the first Managing Director for Theater Latté Da, a Minneapolis-based company committed to new musical theatre. He has produced a variety of events for other organizations such as the Minnesota Chorale and Youth Frontiers, Inc, a non-profit that teaches character education in schools. He has been on the directing staffs for Broadway’s The Lion King and numerous productions at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. As an assistant director at the Guthrie, he worked with Joe Dowling, Sari Ketter, Lisa Peterson, Ethan McSweeney, and Marcela Lorca on productions such as Six Degrees of Separation, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, A Christmas Carol, Blood Wedding and Julius Caesar. At the Virginia Opera, Christopher assisted Lillian Groag on Wagner’s Die Walküre. He has studied with Anne Bogart and Jean Guy Lucat of the Peter Brook Company. He has also worked as a graphic designer for Marinan Design, a boutique design firm in the Twin Cities. Most recently, Christopher created video projections for Maureen McGovern’s A Long and Winding Road at the Metropolitan Room in New York, and for Carol Burnett In Conversation and for Matt Gould’s Free Style both at UCLA’s Reprise!.

MORGAN JENNESS spent over a decade at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, with both Joseph Papp and George C. Wolfe, in various capacities ranging from literary manager to Director of Play Development to Associate Producer. She was also Associate Artistic Director at the New York Theater Workshop and an Associate Director at the Los Angeles Theater Center in charge of new projects. She has worked as a dramaturg, workshop director, and/or artistic consultant at theaters and new play programs across the country, including the Young Playwrights Festival, the Mark Taper Forum, The Playwrights Center/Playlabs, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Double Image/New York Stage and Film, CSC, Victory Gardens, Hartford Stage, and Center Stage. She has participated as a visiting artist and adjunct in playwriting programs at the University of Iowa, Brown University, Breadloaf, Columbia and NYU and is currently on the adjunct faculty at Fordham University. She has served on peer panels for various funding institutions, including NYSCA and the NEA, with whom she served as a site evaluator for almost a decade. In 1998 Ms. Jenness joined Helen Merrill Ltd., an agency representing writers, directors, composers and designers, as Creative Director. She now holds a position in the Literary Department at Abrams Artists Agency. In 2003, Ms. Jenness was presented with an Obie Award Special Citation for Longtime Support of Playwrights.

ALANIS KING is from the Odawa Nation. Her playwriting credits include: Bye Bye Beneshe, Song of Hiawatha: An Anishnaabec Adaptation, Order of Good Cheer, Gegwah, Lovechild, Artshow, Heartdwellers, Manitoulin Incident, Tommy Prince Story, When Jesus Met Nanabush, Storyteller and Step by Step. King was Playwright in Residence at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre in Toronto from 2005 to 2007 and at Nightwood Theatre. She was a past Artistic Director of her home theatre company – Debajehmujig Theatre Group and Native Earth Performing Arts. She has also produced, toured, directed and developed numerous plays on many First Nation communities, a highlight was Lupi the Great White Wolf for the children’s tour to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

MURIEL MIGUEL is Kuna/Rappahannock and a founding member and Artistic Director of Spiderwoman Theater, the longest running Native American women’s theater company in North America. Muriel has studied modern dance with Alwin Nickolai, Erick Hawkins and Jean Erdman. She was an original member of Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater where she performed in the groundbreaking plays: Terminal, The Serpent, Mere Ubu and Viet Rock. Recent choreography & directing credits: Throw Away Kids, She Knew She Was She, the original and touring productions of The Scrubbing Project with Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble, Evening in Paris with co-creator Michelle Olson. Stage credits include: Philomena Moosetail in The Rez Sister, Aunt Shadie in The Unnatural and Accidental Women, Martha in Buz’Gem Blues, Spirit Woman in BONES: An Aboriginal Dance Opera. She has created one woman shows Hot' N' Soft, Trail of the Otter and most recently Red Mother. Muriel has been an Assistant Professor of Drama at Bard College. She is an instructor of Indigenous Performance at the Centre for Indigenous Theatre full time program in Toronto and Program Director for their two summer programs. She was a Program Director for the Aboriginal Dance Program at The Banff Centre and an instructor there for seven years. She has developed four shows for The Minnesota Native American AIDS Task Force working with inner city native youth on HIV/AIDS issues. In 2005, The Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of the American Indian presented a retrospective exhibit honoring Spiderwoman Theater’s years of work. Muriel has been awarded an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, OH and has most recently been profiled in the book, American Women Stage Directors of the 20th Century.

MONIQUE MOJICA is an actor and playwright from the Kuna and Rappahannock Nations. Based in Toronto, she was spun directly from the web of New York’s Spiderwoman Theater. Her play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots was produced in 1990. She is the co-editor, with Ric Knowles, of Staging Coyote’s Dream (An Anthology of First Nations Drama) in English, volumes I & II. She appeared as Grandma Builds-the-Fire in Sherman Alexie’s film Smoke Signals, and was a co-founder of Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble. Monique was last seen as Caesar in Death of a Chief, Native Earth’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. A long-time collaborator in Native Performance Culture research, she was the Artist in Residence for American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois in Spring ’08. Currently she’s creating Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, with Floyd Favel, Oswaldo De León Kantule, Erika Iserhoff & Gloria Miguel. She continues to explore theatre as healing, as an act of reclaiming historical/cultural memory and as an act of resistance.

DANIEL DAVID MOSES (moderator) was born at Ohsweken on the Six Nations lands along the Grand River in southern Ontario, Canada. His plays include his first, Coyote City, a nominee for the 1991 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, (in Necropolitei by Imago Press), Almighty Voice and His Wife (Playwrights Canada Press) and The Indian Medicine Shows (Exile Editions), which won the 1996 James Buller Memorial Award for Excellence in Aboriginal Theatre. He is also the author of Delicate Bodies, poems (Nightwood Editions) and Sixteen Jesuses, poems (Exile Editions), co-editor of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Oxford University Press, third edition 2005), and Pursued by a Bear: Talks, Monologues and Tales, essays (Exile Editions). Exile has also just published his play Kyotopolis (October 2008).

YVETTE NOLAN is Algonquin from Kitiganzibi Nation. Her plays include BLADE, Job’s Wife, Video, Annie Mae’s Movement, the libretto Hilda Blake and the radio play Owen. She is the editor of Beyond the Pale: Dramatic Writing from First Nations Writers and Writers of Colour. Directing credits include Death of a Chief, Tales of An Urban Indian, The Unnatural and Accidental Women, Annie Mae’s Movement (Native Earth), The Only Good Indian..., The Triple Truth (Turtle Gals). As a dramaturg, she works across Canada, most recently as the Festival Dramaturg for Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre Spring Festival of New Plays (2006, 2007). She was the president of the Playwrights Union of Canada from 1998- 2001 and of Playwrights Canada Press from 2003-2005. She is currently the Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, and the President of the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance. She was one of the National Arts Centre’s Playwrights-In-Residence last season.

JENNIFER PODEMSKI, from the Salteaux Nation and part Israeli, is recognized for her roles in Bruce McDonald’s “Dance Me Outside,” CBC’s “The Rez,” “Riverdale” and “Degrassi: The Next Generation.” She is the co-founder of Big Soul Productions (1999 – 2003) and most recently Redcloud Studio’s Inc., an independent film and television production company. She is the co- creator and executive producer of “Moccasin Flats,” North America’s first all aboriginal produced, written and performed dramatic television series, now in it’s third season on The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and Showcase Television. Podemski is currently producing the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards which will air nationally in Canada on Global Television and APTN. She can also be seen on the new Showcase comedy series “Moose TV,” “Rabbit Fall” Season Two - SPACE channel and APTN, and The National Aboriginal Achievement Awards 2009, hosted by Adam Beach on March 6, 2009. She has done workshops with aboriginal youth in theatre, film and music throughout the year and produced the closing ceremonies of the North American Indigenous Games in British Columbia, August 2008.

TAMARA PODEMSKI is a multi-disciplinary artist born and raised in Toronto, Canada. She is a graduate of the Claude Watson School for the Performing Arts in Toronto, where she studied theatre, dance and music throughout its 10-year program. Her acting has spanned across all mediums with credits such as Dance Me Outside, The Rez, Ready or Not, North of Sixty, Moose TV, Rabbit Fall and New Amsterdam. She has acted in several theatre productions, most notably as a member of the Original Canadian Cast of Rent, as well as starring as Maureen in the Broadway Company of Rent. Although she has premiered three films at the Sundance Film Festival, she left her biggest mark this past year, making history as the first Canadian actress, and first Native American actress, to win the Special Jury Prize for Acting. Playing the role of Miri Smallhill in Sterlin Harjo’s Four Sheets To The Wind, Tamara’s performance also garnered her a Best Supporting Actress Nomination for the IFC’s 2008 Independent Spirit Awards. Tamara is currently starring in the World Premiere of Wild Dogs in Toronto, produced by Nightwood Theatre, in association with The Canadian Stage Company.

MARTHA REDBONE, part Choctaw/Shawnee/Cherokee/Blackfeet, is a leading voice in both soul and contemporary Native music. She has been recognized with awards for both of her albums – Skintalk and Home of the Brave, including the 2006 Independent Music Awards Best R&B album; Best Debut Artist at the 2002 Native American Music Awards; and two consecutive Indian Summer Music Awards for Best R&B Album of 2004 and 2005. Also in 2005, Martha received the National HIV/Aids Partnership Red Ribbon Award at the UN for her community work. Currently the Brooklyn native and daughter of a Choctaw/Shawnee/Cherokee/Blackfeet mother and African-American father is working on her third album.

RANDY REINHOLZ, from the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma, has directed close to 50 plays across the U.S. and Canada. He was the director and executive producer of Urban Tattoo and the critically acclaimed productions of Jump Kiss, The Buz'Gem Blues and Please Do Not Touch the Indians and was the executive producer of the 2005 world premiere of Kino & Teresa. In 2006, Reinholz produced and directed the world premieres and tours of Stone Heart and The Red Road and the staged reading of Wild Horses at The Kennedy Center's New Visions / New Voices. In 2007 his Native Voices at the Autry Equity production of The Berlin Blues premiered in Los Angeles. The last three Native Voices productions have been remounted at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York and Washington, D.C. Reinholz has co-sponsored showcases and Native American diversity workshops for ABC and NBC and is an annual guest artist for the FOX American Indian Summer Institute.

DIANNE YEAHQUO REYNER, an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, is a playwright, performer, director, and founding member of both the American Indian Repertory Theatre (AIRT) in 2006, based in Lawrence, Kansas, and Thunderbird Theatre in 1974, based out of Haskell Indian Nations University. Working with Ping Chong, she assisted in the development and presentation of Native Voices – Secret History. She also served as community cultural liaison for the Lied Center of Kansas and panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. Recently developing and directing the original production of ReGenerations: a celebration of our journey and transformation at the Lawrence Arts Center, she continues to present works that blends the traditional with contemporary storytelling.

BETSY THEOBALD RICHARDS joined the Ford Foundation’s Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program in 2003 as a Program Officer in arts and culture. Her portfolio on Indigenous Knowledge and Expressive Culture focuses on strengthening the field of American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian arts and culture in the U.S. She also serves as a chairperson of Ford’s worldwide Committee on Indigenous Peoples, is member of the Foundation’s Philanthropy Learning Group and serves as an advisor to Ford’s global Intellectual Property Initiative. Prior to joining the Foundation, Betsy worked for over fifteen years in a variety of leadership roles for non-profit arts and culture organizations. Most recently, she served as the Director of Public Programs for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut, the largest tribal museum and library in the United States. Her professional experience also includes managing a New York City-based arts-in-education organization and an Obie Award-winning experimental theater company. In addition to her work in arts administration, she has also worked as a theater director and dramaturge, developing scripts by Native American writers throughout the country and in Canada. She has successfully brokered artistic connections between Native artists, mainstream theater companies and other ethnic/racial groups. Betsy’s articles on Indigenous arts and cultures are published in several anthologies and journals including The Drama Review: Journal of Performance Studies; Aboriginal Voices Magazine; TCG’s Seventh Generation Anthology among others. In addition, she has presented on Indigenous issues at venues such as Yale University, United Nations’ Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, and at the International Funders on Indigenous Peoples Conference. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Betsy is proud to serve as the first Native American Program Officer at the Ford Foundation. She holds a bachelor’s degree from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University’s School of Drama.

KARMENLARA SEIDMAN, PhD, developed the first full-length course on Native Drama and Performance for the Tisch Drama Department three years ago. Her teaching inquires into the range of intimate relationships that develop in performance between artist, spectator and community, as well as the critical role of memory, dreams and pleasure in the creation of art. Research areas focus on the integration of physical, transformative performance practices with diverse ethical philosophies, emphasizing the role of performance as a complex response to post-colonial situations and community or personal trauma. Karmenlara’s dissertation, Mas' is Desire, reflects 6 years of ethnographic study of dreaming, ecstatic/erotic dance and the grotesque in masquerade traditions in Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, as a dancer and costumer. She has an interdisciplinary arts background in costume design, contemporary dance and music performance which she has taught to both children and adults, and has performed herself extensively throughout the Midwest, East coast and in the West Indies. Karmenlara is currently collaborating on developing new community theater projects with Muriel Miguel of Spiderwoman Theater. In addition, she teaches an ongoing workshop on performance and ethics with acting students at the National Theater Academy in Norway. Her published work appears in Jeffrey Chock's Trinidad Carnival, in Women in Performance and Performance Research. Karmenlara is also a millinery designer in New York's east village where she is a collaborator with Barbara Feinman, and their headpieces and couture hats have appeared recently in high fashion editorials.

CHASKE SPENCER, from the Lakota-Sioux Fort Peck Indian Reservation, has appeared in TNT’s Into the West, ABC’s Dreamkeeper, and the motion picture Skins. He is currently working on the play Idol Worship.

ROSE C. STELLA is Tarahumara First Nation and Sicilian, and originally from Arizona. She is an actor and singer with a strong background in dance and physical theatre. Her favorite roles include: the title role in Annie Mae's Movement by Yvette Nolan (Native Earth Production); Annie Cook and Veronique St. Pierre (Prairie Theatre Exchange and Persephone Theatre) of Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters. Rose has toured and performed with Daystar Dance Company in the U.S., Cascade Theatre in Canada and West Six Theatre Company in England. Rose has performed in many of Native Earth's Weesageechak Festivals and Trickster Cabarets. In 2003, her first play White Buffalo Calf Woman, a clown show, was work-shopped in the Weesageechak Festival, and subsequently invited to Harbourfront's World's Fare Festival. White Buffalo Calf Woman has since been invited to University of Toronto, and was staged at NOZHEM Theatre at Trent University. Rose has been Artistic Director and Principal of The Centre for Indigenous Theatre since July 2003. In the spring of 2008, Rose directed The Rez Sisters for CIT’s year-end production.

SHEILA TOUSEY from the Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee Nation, has acted in movies, television and in theater in NYC and regional theaters across the U.S. Some of the directors she has worked with include Joanne Akalaitis, Joe Chaiken, Linda Chapman, Kennetch Charlette, Liviu Ciulei, David Esbjornson, Ron Van Lieu, Hanay Geiogamah (American Indian Dance Theater), Lisa Peterson, Betsy Richards, Sam Shepard, Tony Taccone, Paul Walker and Robert Woodruff. In 2006 Sheila was Artist-in-Residence at the Public Theater. During this time she, along with Maria Vail and in collaboration with Sam Shepard, adapted Bottle House, a play based on the short stories and poetry of Sam Shepard. Sheila is also the 2008 recipient of the Lloyd Richards Fellowship for Acting Teachers of Color. She is spending the 2008 fall semester at the Yale School of Drama. Sheila just directed the world premiere of Salvage, a new play by Diane Glancy, which is running at Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles during the month of November.

CHARLES WELDON is a veteran actor of stage, film, and television and has performed professionally since 1968. He began his career as lead singer with the singing group, The Paradons, writing and recording the number one smash hit “Diamonds and Pearls.” Charles went on to perform in the original San Francisco cast of Hair, he came to New York with the Broadway musical Big Time Buck White with Mohammed Ali and, in 1970, joined the Negro Ensemble Company, performing in the classics The Great MacDaddy, The Offering, The Brownsville Raid, A Soldier’s Play, and the Company’s Broadway production of The River Niger. His film career includes Stir Crazy, Serpico, A Woman Called Moses, The River Niger and, more recently, Malcolm X, Drop Squad and The Wishing Tree for Showtime with Alfre Woodard and Blair Underwood. Television credits include Roots: The Next Generation and appearances on the new series Law and Order/Trial by Jury, Police Story, New York Undercover and Law and Order. Charles has recently appeared at the Denver Center for Performing arts in The Madwoman, A Selfish Sacrifice, A Streetcar Named Desire, King Hedley II, Jitney, Coming of the Hurricane, and August Wilson’s Two Trains Running. He is the new Artistic Director for the Negro Ensemble Company, a director, and is the co-founder of the Alumni of the Negro Ensemble Company. He directed Colored People’s Time for New York Public Schools and The Offering at the Rip Rap Studio Theater in Los Angeles. Charles recently starred with S. Epatha Merkerson in the award-winning play Birdy Blue at the Second Stage Theatre in New York City. He also won the “HENRY” for best supporting actor in Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson, this award is given to excellence in regional theater. This year in New York City he was awarded best supporting actor by the Audelco’s for August Wilson’s play Seven Guitars at Signature Theatre.

EDWARD WEMYTEWA is a former Zuni Tribal Councilman, and his connection to his Zuni cultural heritage is through art and language. He is a founding director of Idiwanan An Chawe, a storytelling theater. He is a playwright, performer, and visual artist whose prize-winning paintings and sculpture have been exhibited in museums in Arizona and New Mexico.

WILLIAM S. YELLOW ROBE, JR. is an enrolled member of the Assiniboine Tribe of the Fort Peck Tribes located on the Fort Peck Indian reservation in northeastern Montana. He is the first Native American playwright to receive the First Book Award for Drama from the "Returning the Gift" gathering in Norman, Oklahoma. William is a member of the Ensemble Studio Theater Company, New York, NY, and the Penumbra Theater Company, St. Paul, Minn. He serves on the Advisory Board of Red Eagle Soaring Theater Company in Seattle, Washington. He was the Playwright in Residence at Trinity Repertory Company and a Guest Lecturer/Visiting Professor at Brown University, in Providence, RI. He is presently an Adjunct Faculty member in the English Department at the University of Maine, in Orono, Maine and a Faculty Affiliate in the Creative Writing department at the University of Montana, in Missoula. His works include the full-lengths play, A Stray Dog, which was presented in the first Native Theater Festival at The Public, Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, which received a national tour by the Penumbra Theater Company and Trinity Repertory Company, and The Independence of Eddie Rose. Where the Pavement Ends is a published collection of his one-act works. William is honored to be here at this year’s festival.