Chickasaw

Nicolette Blount is honored to be part of First Storytellers Festival.  Nicolette is a member of the Chickasaw Nation (Raccoon clan) with additional Seminole ancestry. She is a composer, lyricist, writer, performer, and producer. She is a 2024 National Dramatist Guild Foundations Musical Theatre Fellow. Nicolette is the co-writer, composer and lyricist for Savage: The Unconquerable Wanda Savage, which was a semifinalist for 2024 Eugene O’Neill’s NMTC, received Honorable Mention for the 2022 American Playwriting Foundation’s Relentless Award, was a finalist for 2024 Rhinebeck Writers Retreat and the 2024 SHEarts Festival. Savage is currently a finalist for The Playwrights Realm’s Native American Artist Lab and Nicolette was recently commissioned to write a dramatic nonfiction novel about her great grandma, Wanda Savage, with literary agents Park and Fine. Her music has been heard at NYC's famous 54 Below, Joe’s Pub, and at the Laurie Beechman Theatre where Savage had two sold out concerts at the 2019 New York Musical Festival. Through her LLC, Take My Shot Productions, she co produced the Off Broadway show A Commercial Jingle for Regina Comet and is co-producing the new musical In Pieces. She is an investor for the Museum of Broadway and Millennials are Killing Musicals. Nicolette recently started nativetheatreartists.com to help give more visibility to Natives creatives on and off Broadway. The music she self-produced for Savage has garnered 47K streams on all music platforms. Nicolette is a member of Dramatist Guild, ASCAP, Songwriters Guild of America, Society of Composers and Lyricists, TRU, Rise, Muse, and Maestra.

Osage

I grew up in Independence, Kansas (two generations later than William Inge). An hour’s drive to the south was the Osage Reservation.

I’ve been active in theater all my adult years. I've directed productions of sixty-three plays—

in Saint Louis; in Woodstock, N.Y; and in Köln and Hamburg, Germany (plus one opera in

Poughkeepsie). I've acted major roles in scores of other productions—Equity and non-Equity.

I have for over thirty years served as a theater critic for radio station KDHX in St. Louis, and in recent years I’ve had the opera beat for Broadway World. In all I've written over 600 reviews. I've served on the boards of three long-lived theatre companies and worked at play-selection for six.

I have four children (scattered around the country) and six grand-children. I’m married to agifted graphic artist who does scrumptious theater posters.

You may find in my work traces of playwrights I love: J. M. Barrie, Albee, Christopher Fry, Ghelderode and others—and also perhaps a little Dr. Seuss. And maybe William Inge.

Mapuche

Justin P. Lopez - he/him - is a proud mixed-race Indigenous, Latino, and Asian artist and theater-maker. He has performed in professional theaters across the country, including with several Bay Area companies, such as Berkeley Repertory Theater, Marin Shakespeare Company, and Center Repertory Company. His favorite credits include Fernando/Sebastián in KISS MY AZTEC! (Berkeley Rep), Jack in JACK & AIDEN (Ground Floor Theatre, Austin, TX), and Guy in UNBOUND: A KINK OPERA (TigerBear Productions, Palm Springs, CA). As a playwright, Justin's work has been recognized by the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Ashland New Play Festival, and other national organizations focused on new theatrical works.

Cherokee/Choctaw

Maddox Pennington is a nonbinary comedian, professor, and playwright; a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, he is originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University, and their debut bibliomemoir, A Girl Walks Into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me About Life, Love, and Women’s Work was published by Hachette Books in 2017.  Previous writing has appeared on Electric Literature, The Toast, The American Scholar online; they’ve performed at DC Nerd Nite, FemX Improvised Monologues, the DC Drafthouse, the DC LGBTQ Comedy Festival, and other comedy venues.  After teaching college and creative writing in New York and Washington DC, they moved to Los Angeles to join the writing faculty at the University of Southern California, where their teaching interests include Native studies, Disability studies, empathy and monsters. Their work for the stage has been developed with the Native Voices series at the Autry Museum of the American West and the La Jolla Playhouse, NYC’s FRIGID Queerly Festival Off-Off Broadway, the Theatre Viscera Podcast, in LA’s Moving Arts MADLab, and the 2023 T/GNC Reading Festival. They’ve written, directed and produced award-winning plays with majority nonbinary/trans casts, including Love Chicken, Annex, and A Third Space at the Hollywood Fringe. They recently completed a post-apocalyptic workplace comedy pilot with the Native American Media Alliance TV Writer’s Lab. You can find them online at MaddoxKPennington.com and @MKPinLA.

Ojibwe

Marty Strenczewilk is an award winning Ojibwe storyteller, playwright, librettist and lyricist, enrolled with the Sault Ste. Marie tribe. His first full-length play Pink Man or The Only Indian in the Room was the winner of the 2023 Crossroads Project Diverse Voices playwriting competition, culminating in a workshop and residency at Illinois State University. His second full-length play Accountability has been in development with InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia and is under season consideration. Marty is also the story editor for season 6 of the NPR podcast The Modern West, which explores the true history behind the Plains Indian Wars. He was the co-founder of At Hand Theatre Company, an Off-Broadway new plays company that operated in NYC successfully for a decade. Marty is currently the Managing Director for Creative Nations, where he produces Native art across genres, including launching the First Storyteller’s Festival. He has a Theatre BA from SUNY Buffalo and has studied at The Barrow Group, Broadway Dance Center, Alvin Ailey, HB Studio, and Joffrey Ballet.

Ojibwe
PRODUCING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Marty Strenczewilk is an award winning Ojibwe storyteller, playwright, librettist and lyricist, enrolled with the Sault Ste. Marie tribe. He has plays in development with multiple American regional theatres and is the current Managing Director of Creative Nations.

Ojibwe
PROGRAMMING COMMITTEE

Dr. Shannon Epplett is a theatre historian, director, devisor, and an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. He is an Instructional Assistant Professor at Illinois State University, where he has taught theatre history, devised theatre, film studies, and Native American literature and popular culture courses.

Maidu
PROGRAMMING COMMITTEE

Ashlyn Baruti graduated from CU Boulder with a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Bucknell University. Her research explores Native and Indigenous theatre and performance, with an emphasis in Native North American long-distance walking performances.

Apache
WORKSHOP STAGE MANAGER

Martinique is an AEA professional stage manager with significant credits at regional theatres across the country.