The
PLAYWRIGHT
"But Benitez avoids lectures, and makes her people talk like people."
-Kay Kipling, Sarasota Magazine
Hannah Benitez is based out of NYC, originally from Miami FL.She was mostly recently in the writers’ room for the new limited series, La Joconde, directed by Jodie Foster, which you’ll see at some point soon on streaming! She also recently adapted one of her plays with Universal Television, sold it to the studio and wrote the pilot for NBC. Her produced plays include: Adaptive Radiation (Denizen Theatre, American Academy for the Dramatic Arts and Clarence Brown Theatre), Ashe In Johannesburg (Burning Coal Theatre), Dike (New York Theater Workshop 29-hours reading, Urbanite Theatre and Hofstra University), For Closure! (freeFall Theater, [upcoming]), The Queer Seance at #3, Sutton Place (Island City Stage [upcoming]) and a commission for The Hippodrome State Theater [upcoming]. Dike, the prelude play to Saint Brigid, was originally developed for The New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellow Tatiana Pandiani culminating project. These two plays can be done in rep! Benitez made the Kilroy’s List with her bilingual play, GringoLandia. She is a finalist for American Shakespeare Center’s Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries Prize with her comedic adaptation of Henry 6 titled, The 6th, Or, The Patriots. She's had workshops and readings with The Playwrights’ Center, Artists’ Repertory Theater, The Maltz Jupiter Theater and others. She was featured in American Theatre Magazine 6 Theatre Workers You Should Know. Represented by WME (Bash Naran) for film/tv and managed by Michael Claassen (Writ Large). Member of the Dramatist Guild and AEA. English and Spanish language. @hannahbenitezzz
COMING UP:
Rattlestick Theater- Pride Plays 2024- Saint Brigid.
The
DRAMATURGS
Kelly Pekar is a New York City based actress, writer, and teaching artist originally from Cleveland, Ohio.
She has been part of Dike since the its conception as dramaturge and actress. She traveled with the playwright on a sponsored research trip to Dublin to work with Colm Summers on the cultural Irish aspects of the play.
Her favorite acting credits include Lucy Brown in the Off-Broadway, Drama Desk nominated Threepenny Opera at Marvell Repertory Theatre, the world premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Three Sisters at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park directed by John Doyle, and voicing the character of Susan in multiple seasons of the animated series, Spike Team. Kelly has toured the U.S. as a vocalist with the circus, served as a dialect coach, and has enjoyed teaching, directing, and costume designing classical, contemporary, and musical theatre productions regionally. www.kellypekar.com
Colm Summers is an Irish director with an interest in visual storytelling and politically engaged, experimental theatre-making. Credits include: Pseudaria (Project Cube, Live Collision 2017), Love à la Mode After Macklin, by KNAVES (Smock Alley Boys School, Scene + Heard 2017), Gays Against the Free State! (Smock Alley Boys School, Tiger Dublin Fringe, 2016), Enemy of the Stars by Wyndham Lewis (Dublin & Morocco, Winner of the Best Experimental Theatre Award at Fez International Theatre Festival), God’s Ear by Jenny Schwartz, (Samuel Beckett Theatre), Catastrophe and Ill Seen Ill Said, both by Samuel Beckett (SBT + Arts and Technology Research Lab). His work includes internships with Dead Centre, Pan Pan and The Wooster Group, Dublin and New York. His photography was exhibited at Temple Bar Gallery and Steambox (February – March ’16), and his first essay on performance, with Nicholas Johnson, can be read in Blast at 100 (Brill). His second will appear later this year in Charles Macklin and the Making of the 18th Century. He is currently earning his MFA in Theater Studies at Columbia Univeristy in NYC.