2026-27 Resident Playwright Cohort

As a Chicana/Native woman, I write to uplift underrepresented perspectives with truthfulness, authenticity and dignity. By drawing from current and ancestral influences, my focus is to touch the delicate fragility of humanity through heightened realism. The heart of my work is centered around the underdog or the dark horse, who society has written off but is, upon closer inspection, texturally fascinating, deeply poetic and heroic. My work explores a seamless coexistence of the natural and spirit worlds, sometimes juxtaposing humor or song with complex situations like recidivism, deportation, absence, substance abuse and generational trauma.

Being both a proud enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Tribe on my mother’s side and Mexican American on my father’s side, I write for them and the ancestors who came before them and the Midwest working-class family and community I grew up in. They linger in me and drive me to conjure the shadows of their existence on the stage.

Linda Amayo-Hassan (she/her) is a Native & Chicana playwright, actor, and director from the East Bay. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Theatre Cultura and a theatre professor at Chabot College. Linda has had playwriting residencies at Berkeley Rep Ground Floor, PlayGround SF and had the honor of participating in The Kennedy Center Summer Playwriting Intensive.  Her plays have been produced at PlayGround SF, The Pear Theatre, Native Writers’ Theater, Same Boat Theater Collective and More Más Marami Arts. Linda has an MFA in Acting and Directing from the University of Missouri in Kansas City. She is a board member for PlayGround SF, and a proud member of the Spirit Lake Tribe.

I make stories that sparkle. Plays that are playful. Shows that stay with you like a piece of glitter you find behind your ear, a week after you put it on.

I believe that joy and wonder can catalyze change and serve as antidotes to hard times.

My writing aims to balance whimsy with weight. Each play comes from a foundation in truth – sometimes factual, always emotional truth – informed by my background as a journalist and an educator.  From documentary pieces exploring the impacts of climate change to fictional middle school sleepovers, my work contrasts the absurd with the beautiful, heightening and dramatizing life so we can see reality more clearly.

My shows say, “heyyy, come on now, take a breath and feel the sun,” and so you breathe and you feel and for the first time in a long time, it’s like delight and connection and understanding might all be within reach. Even for a night, even for a moment, even for now.

I believe imagination is a critical step towards liberation. That building a new world onstage allows us to create new futures offstage.

You know what they say: all the world’s a stage, baby! Let’s come together and make something beautiful.

Megan Calfas (she/her) is a writer based in San Francisco. Her most recent play, Sleepover, was produced at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She is a creator and director of the acclaimed monologue series Crushing, which sold-out runs in New York and San Francisco and is executive produced by Rosario Dawson. She has coached over 200 people on telling their true, personal stories live on stage and has, herself, performed stories across the Bay, and on PBS with Stories from the Stage. As a journalist, she has reported on the environment for the Los Angeles Times and investigated maternal mortality in Zanzibar. She is on staff with the Stanford Storytelling Project.

In my work, theatrical spectacle is a portal to the sacred. I make theatre because of its capacity to generate new realities by stirring/transforming/igniting/calling in the communities my plays represent.

A bi-cultural child of parents from different hemispheres, I tell stories that reflect my own intersectionality as a Black American, as a South Asian in Diaspora, as a woman, as a mixed kid.

I use research to reclaim overlooked histories and imagine possible worlds. I build epic stories on stage that invite audiences into a state of wonder and leave them with the feeling that they have shared a dream or been on an adventure.

I intentionally explore characters that defy stereotypes and force (us) to recontextualize the present and push (us) to ask new questions. My plays are crafted with the perspective of the community they represent in mind, and I want artists to love creating and performing my work. I reject the degrading spectatorship of Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous bodies in the American theatrical canon. In my work, we are funny, bright, clothed, odd, ingenious, broken, but always whole. 

Aidaa Peerzada (she/her) is a Black and Pakistani American multidisciplinary theatre maker. Her writing reclaims cultural knowledge erased by colonialism, slavery, and systemic racism. With a decade-long career in regional theatre and teaching artistry that has taken her across the US, she is driven to write experiential  plays that inspire curiosity and wonder in the audience. Her plays bring mythological, futuristic, or historical worlds to life through verse, music, and movement to break open reality as we know it on stage. Her works include Children of the Wise  (46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Prop Thtr Chicago),  Lenora II  (Crowded Fire Theater R&D Lab), SHINING (New Roots Theater Festival) and Aliyah and The Princess Jasmine Doll (PCSF, Catalyst: C3T, Meet Cute LA). Aidaa is a graduate of The Baltimore School for the Arts and the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. She is part of the artistic staff at the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Company.

Through my artistic work, I hold an empathetic mirror to the world. I believe that live performance and theatre has the power to unite and heal audiences by asking deep (or deeper) questions of life. My style has evolved from the conscious blending of philosophy, journalism, and storytelling.

Starting out as a journalist, I was inspired to educate audiences and had an interest in explaining complex topics and trends. However, I was truly invested in getting audiences to be emotionally engaged in these news stories.

In college, I was able to write my first play while in an independent study towards my philosophy degree. I wrote a piece that would be judged and adjudicated like a research paper. To this end, every play that I write is a philosophical inquiry to get audiences participating in live discussion, discourse, and discovery.

I found that live performance could create spaces where people can come together, learn about an idea, and explore it. I doubled down on my love for this art form by working in non-profit management and arts producing. Now, I not only write, but I emotionally ground social and political topics with care. This sensitivity is also woven through my experiences as a journalist and critic, conflict facilitator, producer, and educator.

I’m told that the only thing greater than my thoughtful eye is my warm and humorous heart — which guides my practices.

Ultimately, I’m inspired to create spaces where people can explore the deepest questions about their lives and their world. Always seeking the surprising and poetic truth, my work will make you lean in and listen to the people closest to you — even if that person is yourself. 

Julius Ernesto Rea (he/they) is a Bay Area-based playwright, journalist, producer, grant writer and conflict resolution facilitator. Rea co-founded journalism theatre company The Forum Collective in 2018; he is also a previous Theatre Bay Area Arts Leadership Residency artist, which allowed him to work with Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. Dedicated to holistic healing and equity, they create new projects on underrepresented narratives based on deeply-rooted research, interviews, and dramaturgy. Most recently, he was the writer of The Day the Sky Turned Orange, co-produced by SFBATCO and Z Space.