Playwright Bios for
Make/Believe

 

Kim Z. Dale is a Chicago-based writer of plays, essays and short fiction. Her play A Skewed Nude won the playwright award at the Pittsburgh New Works Festival and the best script award at the Maryland Community Theatre Festival before being presented at the Great Plains Theatre Conference. Kim's other full-length and one-act plays include Endeavor Mind, Pump, The Wrong Mistake, Pseudo-Kinesis, Necromony USA and The Pants and the Virgin (A Christmas Play). Kim is a former ChicagoNow blogger, and one of her essays appears in Belt Publishing's Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook. Like many playwrights Kim has a master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University, but unlike most playwrights her degree is in information security policy.

FEMelanin is a collective of multi-disciplinary, femme artists of color with a mission to reclaim our voices. We commit to artistic rigor, social justice, and a collaborative process based in ideation and play. We develop artistically excellent, culturally necessary work as playwrights, poets, dancers, actors, musicians, directors and visual and teaching artists.

Seth Freeman

Stinky Bird

Seth Freeman is a playwright, journalist and writer/producer of television, for which he created the series Lincoln Heights. His work in TV has received multiple Emmys, Golden Globes, Writers Guild and other awards. His print work has appeared in The New York Times, Southern Theatre Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, California Magazine, Stars and Stripes, the Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Hill, YaleGlobal and many other periodicals. There have been over 190 productions and readings of his plays of varying lengths around the world. He dedicates non-writing time to institutions devoted to health care, education and the empowerment of women and human rights, and in June of 2019 received a Masters degree in Public Health. 

Jack Helbig is a teacher, journalist and playwright living in Oak Park, Illinois. His work has been produced across the United States and in Australia. He has written about theatre in the Chicago Reader for a very long time. He contributes radio plays to the Don’t Call me Sweatheart Show on Lumpen Radio in Chicago.

Margaret Helbig is currently a college student. She was much, much younger when she collaborated with her father on this fairy tale. She loves gymnastics and dogs. 

Carolyn Minor

Scaredy Friends

Carolyn Minor has been creating theater and performance in Chicago since 2001. She was a company member of the now defunct Knife & Fork Theatre Company that built artwork with a heavy emphasis on devised and movement-based pieces. She is currently production managing at City Lit Theater Company and is the education assistant and a teaching artist with American Blues Theater. She has written pieces performed at You Only Live Once More for SoloCrowd Chicago, at AbbieFest for Knife & Fork, and Brecht 3 High Fest for The Island Theater Company. As an advocate for empathy and early childhood exposure to the arts, she is grateful to be included in the Make/Believe festival for Ghostlight Ensemble this season.

Corey Pajka’s work has appeared regionally at Phoenix Stage Company in Connecticut, Exit 7 Players in Ludlow, Massachusetts, the University of Houston and Weathervane Theatre in New Hampshire (book writer for children’s theater musical Animaloopidy, based on music and lyrics by T.O. Sterett). New York credits include appearances at Cherry Lane Theatre, the 14th Street Y, the Kraine Theater, The Secret Theater in Long Island City, Gallery Players in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn College. Plays The Human Room, Visible Cosmic Entities, Outer Space Beats Hollywood Every Time and children’s theatre play The Queen of Cocoa Puffs and The Cap’n Crunch King have received publication. Radio plays The Separation, Meddling Kids, The Stand In, My Violet Brooklyn, The (Drunk) Call of Cthulhu and May The Fourth Be With You are available for free download on Apple Podcasts. A staged reading of his full-length play Everyone Is An Astronaut is also available for free download on iTunes. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, playwright D.L. Siegel, and their Pembroke Welsh Corgi Sancho Panza. He is set to begin graduate studies in Creative Writing at the City College of New York in the fall of 2019.

Sonya Sobieski

Little Red Reboot

Gifted and Talented, Sonya’s most recent full-length play, was a finalist for the Detroit New Works Festival 2018. She is an affiliated artist with New York City's Obie Award-winning New Georges, who commissioned and premiered Commedia dell Smartass, an alternative take on the archetypes of high school. Her writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, as well as Smith & Kraus’s The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2013 and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2016. Morning Announcements, a one-act for middle school performers, is licensed by Stage Partners. Masster of Fine Arts Brooklyn College.

Lori Taylor

Asherella

Lori Taylor is a former broadcast journalist who received her Bachelor of Journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia. In addition to journalism, she studied playwriting and wrote numerous plays while at school. One of these plays, Grand’s Great Plan, was one of a select number of plays performed at the university in a series showcasing student playwrights. She enjoys writing children’s plays, children’s books and anything with an element of whimsy and magic.