DANI BEDAU
DIRECTOR/PRODUCER
Dani (she/her/hers) is a theatre artist and educator. She is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Television, and Film at SDSU where she also heads up the Youth Theatre area. Dani has directed a lot of plays and written or devised a few. She has also co-authored several articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Dani has over 25 years experience creating theatre programs that facilitate conversations across areas of social distance such as race, sexual orientation, gender identity and social class. She created the Coming Up Taller Award-winning Will Power to Youth program in Los Angeles and has engaged in work that uses theatre to forge alliances with the Arab-speaking world. Dani is committed to creating brave spaces for learning and growing, to providing leadership opportunities for student artists and to imperfectly doing her part in the struggle to dismantle hierarchy and end white supremacy.
JAMES BRANDON
AUTHOR/PRODUCER
Brandon (he/they) is an author, actor, producer and 2SLGBTQ+ advocate. He produced and played the central role of Joshua in Terrence McNally’s play, Corpus Christi, touring to international acclaim for ten years, and subsequently co-directed the documentary based on their journey, Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption. He is the co-founder of the I AM Love Campaign—an arts-based initiative bridging the 2SLGBTQ+ and faith-based communities—and currently serves on the Board of the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits organization in San Francisco. Brandon’s bestselling debut novel, Ziggy, Stardust & Me, has been translated into three languages, and was named one of the best YA Books of the Year in 2019 by Entertainment Weekly, Teen Vogue, Buzzfeed, and Seventeen Magazine, among others. His second novel, The Edge of Being, was equally lauded by critics and released in October, 2022. Visit his website
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JESSIE FIELD
WRITER
JAMES MARTINEZ SALEM
WRITER/COMPOSER
Jessie (she/her) and James (he/him) are an award-winning queer musical theatre writing team. Most notably Field & Salem have written Charlotte Lucas is 27 and Not Dead, a radical and inclusive queer adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (WINNER: Musicals Now Competition, 2023 NAMT Finalist, 2022 Piper Theatre Workshop Production, 2022 Semifinalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Musical Theatre Conference, a 2022 Semifinalist for SDSU’s New Musicals Initiative, 2021 sold-old staged reading at Dixon Place through All Out Arts). Field & Salem were also commissioned to adapt James Brandon’s novel Ziggy, Stardust & Me (2023 reading at SDSU, 2023 workshop production at SDSU’s Prebys Theatre, 2024 workshop reading at Diversionary Theatre.) Field & Salem were selected to participate in the 2022 Prospect Theatre Lab and are members of Theatre Now’s New York musical theatre lab, where they are developing a new pop punk musical about atypical anorexia, Fat Girl Starving. Fat Girl Starving was featured at the 2024 Prospect Theatre and the Latiné Musical Theatre Lab’s Musical Mixtape Concert. Field & Salem came together as collaborators on the musical webseries Is This Art Now? A Musical in the Time of Corona, which can be found in its entirety on YouTube. In 2021, James was a finalist for the Marvin Hamlisch International Music Award for emerging musical theatre artists. In 2022, Jessie’s short play, Too Much Lesbian Drama: One Star, was a winner of the 47th Annual Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival in 2022; it was published in 2023. Both Jessie and James received a Master’s of Fine Arts from NYU Tisch’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program and are avid dog lovers and board game aficionados. www.jamessalemmusicals.com & www.jessiefield.com
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COURTNEY ELKIN MOHLER
DRAMATURG
Courtney is a director, dramaturg, and scholar who focuses on contemporary Native theater. She regularly directs and dramaturgs for the professional Native American theatre company Native Voices in Los Angeles and serves on their National Play Reading Panel. Most recently, she is co-author with Jaye T. Darby and Christy Stanlake of Bloomsbury-Methuen’s Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre: Indigenous Spaces. Courtney joined the faculty of Boston College as an Associate Professor of Theatre in Fall 2022.