Regina Porter is an American writer. Her lyrical stories explore modern relationships against a shifting American landscape. Ms. Porter worked for several years in Program Development for Public Television before embarking on her writing career. Her plays have been presented at Playwrights Horizons, The Joseph Papp Theater, New York Stage & Film, The Woolly Mammoth Theater, and Horizons Theater Company. She has also been commissioned by The Women's Project, The Actor's Theater of Louisville, and Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis.

Ms. Porter grew up reading and listening to multicultural folktales, particularly from the African-American South. She counts these tall tales among her many influences. Her stories often spotlight ordinary people in complex family dynamics who find their lives opening up in surprising ways. Ms. Porter's writing has been profiled in Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in History & Criticism by The University of Alabama Press. Her plays have been anthologized in Plays from Woolly Mammoth from Broadway Play Services and Heinemann's Scenes For Women by Women.

Ms. Porter's awards include an Edward Albee Fellowship; Hedgebrook Women Writers Fellowship; Kennedy Center Award for Outstanding New American Play; and Helen Hayes Awards Nomination and John Gassner Memorial Award for Outstanding One Act Play. She is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied Dramatic Writing and was a Lew Wasserman Scholar and a Paulette Goddard Scholar. She is also the recipient of Tisch's Distinguished Alumna Award.

Ms. Porter lives in Brooklyn, New York and is currently at work on her first novel and a new play.        

MELIA BENSUSSEN  has directed extensively around the country since 1984, including productions at the Huntington Theatre, Merrimack Rep, Actors’ Shakespeare Project, La Jolla Playhouse, Baltimore Center Stage, Hartford Stage Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the New York Shakespeare Festival, Manhattan Class Company, Primary Stages, the Long Wharf Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse, Actors Theatre of Louisville (Humana Festival), People’s Light and Theatre Company (where she received a Barrymore nomination for Best Direction), Bay Street, and Playwrights Horizons.

Her highly regarded work with new plays has taken her to the O’Neill Theater Center, New York Stage and Film/Powerhouse, the Midwest Playlabs/The Playwrights Center, and other new play programs across the U.S. Ongoing collaborations with playwrights include such wonderful writers as Kirsten Greenidge, Annie Baker, Mat Smart, Ken Urban, Masha Obolensky, Jeffrey Hatcher, Lee Blessing, Richard Dresser, Willy Holtzman, Edwin Sanchez, Y York, and Jose Rivera, among others.

Raised in Mexico City, Melia is fluent in Spanish and has translated and adapted a variety of texts. Her edition of the Langston Hughes translation of Garcia Lorca’s Blood Weddingis now in its eighth printing by Theatre Communications Group.

Besides winning the OBIE award for Outstanding Direction, Melia was twice given Directing Awards by the Princess Grace Foundation, USA, including their top honor, theStatuette Award for Sustained Excellence in Directing. She is featured in
Women Stage Directors Speak by Rebecca Daniels (McFarland and Co.), and in Nancy Taylor’s Women Direct Shakespeare (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). Her essay on Merchant of Venice will be published this year in Jews, Theatre, Performance in an Intercultural Context by Brill Publishing.

A graduate of Brown University, Melia is Chair of the Performing Arts Department at Emerson College in Boston.