First Online With Fran

I came up with this idea that we would have workshops, and we would have formerly incarcerated people come to the workshops, and we would teach them about organizing and teach about women's suffrage, civil rights, and marriage equality. How impactful a group of people can be if they all have the same interest. They're voters. They can talk to the state legislators and tell them, 'I'm a voter and what they're doing is making my life really hard.' And, to my great surprise, it totally worked! Amanda DuBois—attorney, social justice advocate, and author of the award-winning Camille Delaney legal-mystery series. Amanda DuBois is the founder and managing partner of DuBois Levias Law Group, one of Washington’s longest-standing, woman-owned law firms.

I was pleasantly surprised and [found it] incredibly fulfilling when we brought kids who I interviewed down to Florida and thank you to the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra -- they gave us the opportunity to bring these young activists into schools and introduce these young activists -- this is three days after the last election so other kids in these schools were feeling very defeated; in the beginning they were afraid to ask questions...and our kids were in their 20s now and said, "OK, so you're upset.so, what are you gonna do?" There was an exchange of energy between the two of them that was so absolutely gratifying. That was the cherry on top for me. ~Portia Kamons, librettist  SEVENTEEN is a symphonic portrait of young Americans confronting an unprecedented range of challenges, from gun violence to climate change. An orchestral work in four movements with spoken libretto of verbatim text, it’s a powerful representation of young lives at the cusp of adulthood in America today.Portia Kamons is a writer and producer of theater, music, live events, and feature film. In New York City with En Garde Arts, she produced FATHER WAS A PECULIAR MAN, ANOTHER PERSON IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY, and BASETRACK LIVE, a verbatim multimedia work named in the top ten productions of 2014 by The New York Times.Ron Ramin was born and raised in New York City. He earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton University, where he majored in music and studied privately with Milton Babbitt. Upon graduation, he moved to Los Angeles where he composed music for 20 Primetime television series and 30 movies/telefilms.

Anything that brings us back into the center of ourselves, into the space that literally is your heart, the center of you and recalls the truth of who you are, you should feel better. So, you are responding to who YOU are, not as who you're protecting yourself from. Kiana Webb is the founder and CEO of Glorious Arisings —a movement at the intersection of conscious leadership and spiritual transformation. Her work fuses leadership development, personal transformation, and spiritual wisdom to guide people toward deeper self-awareness, fulfillment, and meaningful impact.

We are making sure that the arts remain independent, well-funded, and accessible for all. Anytime anything rears its ugly head to challenge that, we will be there fighting for you. ~Erica Lauren OrtizErica Lauren Ortiz (she/her) is a seasoned non-profit leader, arts advocate, and creative producer with deep roots in theatre, media, and cultural strategy. She currently serves as the Lead of Advocacy & Governance Programs at Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization at the forefront of building a just and thriving theatre ecology.

I don’t really produce plays. There are many other organizations that are wonderful at producing plays, and I’m not interested in someone coming in that’s completely done and all they’re really looking for is financial support. I don’t work like that. What most excites me is when I meet with an artist who would love to do a site-specific piece, and in whatever form it might take whether it be outdoors or indoors, in a car, in an elevator, on a roof or wherever it could be. They see a necessity for why En Garde and no one else. Anne Hamburger (she/her) Founded En Garde Arts in 1985. As its Executive Artistic Director, she is responsible for pioneering site-specific theatre in New York, using its streets and historic landmarks as her stage.

Our nuclear security has been compromised and that really is a dangerous situation because all of our nuclear sites are nuclear power plants, or they are a theoretically defunct site like where nuclear Hanford doesn't occur anymore, but it represents three super-fund sites that need to be cleaned up because of the amount of nuclear waste. What has been a really good outcome of [writing this book] is this being in the news again, people are starting to understand what a threat the amount of nuclear waste that's already been created can be to the public at large, because nuclear waste is volatile. Kay Smith-Blum, a former fashionista and Seattle School Board President, spends her days debunking the tropes of the mid-20th-century history. An odd dream and the recent upheaval over leaking radioactive waste tanks at the Hanford Nuclear site compelled her to write, TANGLES, named 2024 Book of the Year by the Literary Global Book Awards and Best Debut Fiction by the American Writing Awards 2024. 

This new book I've written SWEET DREAMS AHEAD FOR BED is a story that literally outlines the steps for getting ready for sleep for babies to four-year-olds. Also, in the book are tips for parents on how to get your child to go to sleep. And what I've discovered in the new books I've been doing is the front of the book is the story, and the back four pages are parenting information...So, now what's happening is parents are reading the book out loud, then they're reading the tips. It's a wonderful way to get information to parents. This has really been successful. Tish Rabe (“Robby”) is a bestselling children’s author, professional singer, animation Head Writer, scriptwriter and lyricist. She has written over 200 books for Sesame Street, Disney, Nickelodeon, PBS Kids and many more

Whether it's about immigrants, Iranians, Lebanese people or Jews in Warsaw or transgender characters or whatever those characters may be, I feel that, especially theatre, is like a mirror that you hold up to society either to its past, its possible future, its darknesses, its lightness -- things that we don't want to engage with every day in life because it actually has real-day consequences, but as actors we get to share that with people to have that experience with us, and I think it changes people.  Pooya Mohseni is a multi-award-winning Iranian American actor, writer, filmmaker and transgender activist. She is making her Broadway debut in Sanaz Toossi's Pulitzer winning play "English" at the Roundabout Theater.

Age tells us one thing: the day you were born and the day you will die, and there's a dash in between. And you know what? That dash is ME! That dash represents who you are. And it is up to YOU: to describe, to define, to manage your 'dash'. Don't ever let anyone manage your dash for you. ~Dr. Solanges VivensDr. Solanges Vivens is a nursing professional, entrepreneur, educator and product of Georgetown University School of Nursing. She and two minority partners formed VMTLTC Inc., in 1988. It was a multi-faceted, multi-million-dollar health care company which began on one simple idea: Commitment to Quality.

I love writing about women because this is how women are, and we're so diverse, right? We show our power in so many different ways, and sometimes it's not a lot of lines in the play; sometimes, it's just the way they show up. Cynthia Grace Robinson playwright/screenwriter/lyricist was born and raised in The Bronx, New York. "I use my platform as a Writer to amplify the voices of characters and narratives rarely portrayed on stage and screen. I believe as storytellers we have a unique opportunity to broaden the spectrum and deepen the complexity of the stories we choose to tell."

What I really wanted to do was to show a strong, flawed woman - a hundred years ago! - dealing with the same issues that strong, flawed women are dealing with today.KAREN E. OSBORNE, an award-winning and Amazon Kindle best-selling author of four suspense novels–Reckonings (award-winning family saga/suspense), Tangled Lies (award-winning murder mystery), Getting It Right (recognized by Essence Magazine as a Best Read), True Grace, (award-winning historical fiction inspired by her grandmother, set in 1924 Harlem, NY), and Justice for Emerson, a dual timeline murder mystery due out March 13, 2025.

What is central to my work is comedy. For me, there is a desperation in comedy that's very theatrical. And that you can ultimately get a play to a place where everybody wants to just kill themselves or they can tell a joke. So, to me, that's often where they often land. These are your choices: you can kill yourself or die or tell a joke. ~Theresa Rebeck Theresa Rebeck is a prolific and widely produced playwright, whose work can be seen and read throughout the United States and abroad. Last season, her fifth Broadway play premiered on Broadway, making Rebeck the most Broadway-produced female playwright of our time.

For me, acting is the greatest tool we have right now to teach people empathy. Because empathy requires you to put yourself squarely in the shoes of another person. I thin, therefore, acting should be a required subject that should be taught. Anything that teaches empathy. ~Adam DavenportAdam Davenport is the Founder and Artistic Director of The International Acting Studio (TIAS), with regular ongoing workshops in Belgrade, Budapest, Zagreb and Prague overseeing the coaching of more than 100 actors in Europe, from actors just starting their careers to well-established and famous actors in their own countries: including Guslagie Malanda, Jelena Gavrilović, Ana Geislerova, Kata Dobo, Slaven Došlo and Ivan Kamaras.

In BLANK, I wanted to open readers' eyes a little bit more to the inner workings of the publishing world. I started as an aspiring author then became an author ... I was immediately surprised and discouraged by how hard it is for ANY book to find its audience amid all the other books out there in the market. Zibby Owens is the bestselling author of Blank: A Novel, Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature, Princess Charming, and the forthcoming novel Overheard. She is the editor of three anthologies: On Being Jewish Now, Moms Don’t Have Time To Have Kids, and Moms Don’t Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology. Zibby has regularly contributed to “Good Morning America,” Vogue, Oprah Daily, and many other outlets.

Holding people's feet to the fire by just saying, 'You know what, you may think that a lot of women are being hired.' 'I've done five shows last season, isn't that enough to make women happy?' 'No! it's the consistency of the pattern of hiring because we've been doing this now for fifteen years!' ~Martha SteketeeMartha Wade Steketee is a critic, researcher, and dramaturg. Michigander, who loved movies and theater, went off to study literature at Harvard and social science and social welfare at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Michigan, spent 20 years as a court researcher and domestic policy analyst in university and nonprofit research offices in several cities, then landed in dramaturgy, criticism, and theater research.

I came to New York to meet people I read about in college like Joe Chaiken and Judith Malina, and I met them! I took workshops with Joe Chaiken, and he was very encouraging, and so how could I NOT stick with it if Joe Chaiken thinks I'm doing okay? It was a dream come true. ~Alyssa SimonAlyssa Simon is an award-winning theatre and film actor, who has performed modern works, classics, cabarets and musicals in the U.S., U.K., Argentina and the Caribbean. She was selected as A Person Of The Year by Martin Denton of nytheatre.com for her acting work and she was also a Master Mason at the Caffe Cino award winning Brick Theatre.

Alot of the reasons why the male/female -- the binary, in general, was for men specifically like white men and colonizers, to assert dominance and control over people who were lesser than them or predominantly women and women of color is that they could marry them, own them, and enslave them. So, these containers were a sort of act of violence on people; that being said, claiming and reclaiming the labels can be an act of liberation.  ~Reid PopeReid Pope (they/them) is a comedian, playwright, and Jew (despite the ironic last name) who’s been featured in PAPER, Vulture, and Boys With Plants Magazine. They do stand-up around NYC and serve as the Head Writer and Executive Producer of Late Stage Live: a trans-led monthly late-night comedy news show on Brooklyn public access.

Theater is both a spiritual healing and emotional healing and even physical healing for me, and it's been my raison d'etre for most of my life, and that's been problematic, at times, because...as a professional actor there are going to be times when you're not engaged or employed in my chosen profession, but I still go back to the theater to look for sustenance, inspiration, community --all those imperatives that I cannot find anywhere else to date. Steven Hauck actor/playwright recently made his directorial debut with TOMORROW WE LOVE (co-author Jeffrey Vause) at the Chain Theater in New York. He directed that production, as well as plays and musicals at Newstage Theatre, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, Geva Theater and the Red Barn Playhouse.

The theater is essential to the health of a nation - of any democracy. And perhaps we are so impoverished right now is because of our inability to communicate with each other and see anyone else's point of view other than our own is that we are theater starved. This is where one gets the whole package of the humanist code is in the theater. This is where the big ideas of the day are truly debated, and this has been going on since the Greeks! Emily Mann is a playwright, screenwriter, director, mentor, and McCarter Theater’s Artistic Director and Resident Playwright Emerita, dedicated to creating and supporting theater that impels conversation, debate, and empathy in an increasingly polarized world.

Harriet Tubman knows how to relate to the different groups because Harriet doesn't 'see' people like [cultural entities]; my audience is seen as humans, a beautiful mélange of people that are just there -- all together -- breathing in sync. ~Christine DixonChris Dixon has been directing, producing, booking, and starring in the award-winning, one woman show Harriet Tubman Herself. This production first got its start with a grant from Staten Island Arts. She belongs to SAG-AFTRA, Arts Ignite, The African American Women in Cinema, The New York Women in Film & Television.